Bombs were the last thing on his mind. It was scotch tape that was presently obsessing him. He had no idea why the image of scotch tape floated there, as it hovering in space, as the explosions and mayhem and chaos reigned around him.
Pierre Leclaire was a soldier in an army of two. Him and his dog Rufus. They had a gun, three boxes of crayons and a wad of chewed up Bubblicious. His mom had always told him he could make the most creative things out of nothing, so the bubblicious had become somewhat of an obsession.
Today,...
My mother toils under the assumption that she is beautifully imperfect but the world should be perfect. She reacts to news like a small child. Living in the moment with the belief that what is going on now will be what goes on forever. I am her child and I am the same.
We slump together from depression to remission, my mother and I. We stay on the couch for days at a time drinking wine, eating Oreos, and watching reality television. Then Mom gets an alimony check or I finally land a job interview and the fever breaks. We...
The lamp wouldn't turn on. Off, yes. around, yes. But on, absolutely not. No matter how many times he flipped the switch, no matter how many times he prodded it, shook it, swung it over his head, he could not get it to turn on. He decided to coax it. First he offered it things that humans like: chocolate, love and affection, sex. The lamp did not budge. Then he offered it things that his cat liked: mackerel, catnip, a laser. Nothing. He tried reasoning with it, but the lamp was dead to his entreaties. Look, he explained, you staying...
The drugs were beginning to wear off. Minute by minute the butterflies, those glorious, evanescent, friendly butterflies, were fading. She pressed the earpiece of her headphones to her ear. Pink Floyd were sounding like a noisy nightmare. As she gazed out across the valley, with its endless vista of trees, trees and more trees, she came down to earth with a bump. She should get back to work - artificial props might give her a brief respite, but she had a deadline to meet and a quota to make. Sighing, she pressed stop and slipped her headphones down round her...
Sunday was when we went. Dad wanted to leave on Sunday so we could avoid the McDonald family, who spent every Sunday molting on the front lawn. Last year, Mr. McDonald's head fell off. He grew another one the next day. Only now his hair was green and he could shoot laser beams out of his eyes. Also, he shat turnips. But enough of that.
We climbed into the station wagon and turned right onto Fallinott Street. The street was named after Lucas Fallinott, who lived in Detroit. He invented the toothbrush in 1762.
As we drove, we saw Mr....
Majestic words like maelstrom, preponderance, warbling swirl through my creative whirlpool, pulling in pieces of conversation, tail-ends of admonitions, the lilt of swearing. I live by the calendar, fitting my days into the squares, x'ing the boxes at midnight.
Friday is the wave that crashed but hasn't withdrawn to the sea. I'll compose this in the spiked surf.
The farmer had just left, when the old woman paused scooping up the silver to ponder on his telling. "Blue eyes? Could have sworn they were brown."
She shrugged and lifted a loose board to join the fee with treasured cousins beneath the stair. A knock at the door left her breathless in the hurry to conceal her hoard.
"Who… who is it?" she wheezed. Rather than answer, the caller entered quickly and fell behind the door.
"It's about the eye drops." whispered the same maid as had visited before. "I'd put them in when the Mistress startled me. I...
The elephant dragged it's feet leaving sandy clouds of gritty dust in its wake. Behind the elephant a group of half naked woman shook their tambourines and threw spectacular colours of powder around. The colours merged like a flour rainbow. I wondered where my mother had gone and imagined that she had been swallowed up in this multi coloured whirlwind.
I needn't have worried. There she was bending over the twin tub, her hair scraped back, her muscular arms winding the mangle in a slow, precise action. She turned to me and smiled. My heart leapt. She very rarely smiled....
"Light. I feel light"
"I should think so, you lost about half of you."
I struggled to open my eyes, afraid to see what had happened. The last thing I remembered before the darkness was the light, the bright light that had surrounded and suffused me, that had seemed to consume me. A hand waved in front of my face, and at first I was certain it wasn't mine, couldn't be mine. I had never been that skeletal, I had always been a rather large man.
"Easy there, you just did something stupid or amazing, and you're rather week. We...
Her breath rose from her body in swirls of ash. The air wheezed from her as you would expect the air would travel through a burnt husk of a body. Each night she burned, crumbling into herself, waking in a bright fury with the morning sun. Some called her a phoenix, a goddess of the volcano, Pelée.
I was a lowly stream, trembling, trickling in her wake. The heat of her caused my innards to boil, and the creatures would leave me. The earth heaved with her breath, the tumbling rocks rolling, the sparks floating away with the grace of...