This is all verbose juvenile sludge, but its my juvenile sludge, so it goes on the website regardless. granted, a lot of this work is borrowed voice. Im a lot more focused on constructions than like literary phrases i guess. I get a lot of joy from stringing words together.
EMILE
Prior to my permanent arrival, we spoke in our respective tongues. Filled with youthful malleability and the corresponding inability to say anything truly worth saying, he would speak in the learned manner of this country and I replied in our mother's speech. Dancing across the water. Balanced. I have no siblings and neither does he, and so we connected and separated instinctively. Once I came to visit while it was snowing. I was unused to the dry, frigid air, burning my lungs and expelled as smoke. It was my first time seeing the sky turn white. I watched him make angels in the ground and gleefully copied him.
"Here, try this."
He gestured at the lid of some plastic tub he had stolen from my aunt's closet, and we laughed and screamed all the way down, and then trudged back up and did it all over again. And then it was over. His sister, in the aggregate, for but a few months. The last time he came to see me I had not yet learned all the particulars of English and still found it comfortable to engage in our arrangement, but now we stood on the same ground. Used the same idioms. Spoke our minds improvisationally, fluidly, not in some constructed childish pantomime. We observed the disparate reality of our thoughts for the very first time.
His stature, too, had changed. He stood unusually upright, scapula retracted, some pinned butterfly or disciplined ballerina. A body no longer in some androgynous state, but imbued with first wisps of virility. The round of the shoulder separated from the arm. The triangle of his back extended up into his neck. I watched his eyes flick up and down women on the beach, impulsively, and I felt a mother's disappointment. For in seeing him age so rapidly I understood how young he was, how young we were. This ageless entity, with whom I had entertained an abstract correspondence for so long, now revealed to be nothing but a boy.
The tide peeled back as our shadows lengthened. The tip of his nose and feet started to burn a mild pink, my darker complexion still unscathed. He gestured towards the surf and started to run. I followed. The sand near the waterline was firm and cold and ridged in patterns like the roof of a mouth. We ran without speaking and for moments it felt right. I tried to trip him and he kicked sand back at me. Then the water came up over my ankles and I felt nothing like a child. I understood that he felt it too because he slowed to a walk and then stopped and stood there with his hands on his hips breathing hard, looking out at the horizon with an expression I will call, for lack of a better word, embarrassed. We walked back without discussing it. The sun was a wound on the water and then it wasn't, and the beach repopulated with the long blue shadows of things.
We drove in the morning, as the fog covered the estuary. Blasting music loudly in the battered minivan that had been to hell and back and back again, odd stains and an odder smell evidence of a vehicle for maturation. The bass shook something in the dashboard loose, some plastic panel rattling at just the wrong frequency. Emile's mother sang along with mine, and I watched the smiles on their faces from the backseat through the rearview mirror. Neither could sing, but still, a kind of harmony. My aunt in isolation always seemed so severe, but here the severity had nowhere to sit. Her face rearranged itself around the singing, creased and contorted as they volleyed the music of their youth. She was always the firebrand to my mother's apathy. Older and angrier perhaps? Or younger and resentful? Unsure who was born first. But watching them now you could see it, some old current that ran between them, volatile and familiar.
Once, in Caracas, they were stuck in traffic. Traffic was a dull constancy in the city, perhaps not now, but then, when people had things to do and the city was alive with expectation. Old roads constricting, a plastic band cutting into the green flesh of a growing sapling. They wound through the valley like stacked ribbons, motorcycles needling through the threadwork, vendors walking the median with cases of Polar, ten different radios bleeding into each other through open windows, diesel and heat rising off the asphalt. My father's face was flush with indignation. He held his mother's countenance—round, almost gentle—and had never forgiven it, the softness betraying him now, twisting into something that recalled nothing so much as a whining baby.
"What the fuck are you doing...? Get the fuck over towards the exit! You're going to miss the exit... I can't possibly be late because of some insolent bitch that doesn't know how to drive."
My mother placed a hand on his knee and said his name once, quietly, the way you speak to something that might bite. He kept going. His voice had that recursion to it, looping back over the same grievance, tightening. A slap connected. My aunt merged over to the side of the overpass. Eight lanes. Semi trucks blaring, commuters honking. Left him there, briefcase and all.
The marsh returned in pieces through the window. Emile had his head against the glass, I could see the side of his face in the reflection, transparent, superimposed over the passing green, a boy made briefly of swamp and tempered soda-lime. His mother was driving now. Mine had her feet on the dashboard, sandals off, toes curling and uncurling absently, thinking without speech. Then Orlando assembled itself. Not suddenly, but in accumulation. The way a headache builds. Billboards, then strips of strip malls: Wendy's. Walgreens. Wawa. Everything the same flat height, as if the land itself refused it.
The apartment complex had a name that contained the word "gardens." A wide black pond lay opposite the H blocks. The parking lot was full of vehicles in various states of negotiation with functionality. My uncle's truck sat in the same spot it had occupied for months now, pooling dark fluid onto the asphalt. Inside, the nightly compression. Six people in two bedrooms and a living room that was also a bedroom, the couch a site of territorial dispute between my uncle and whatever guest had arrived most recently. For now it was Emile and his mother on the pull-out, toe to head in an approximation of privacy. For the moment he had won, his wiry frame leaning forward as he twirled the TV remote. Tomás's eyes were glassy. Betrayed nothing. He had a way of lingering in spaces before he entered them, testing the waters, under the security of doorways. The raised furrow of tissue on his palm, pink against brown. My grandmother was in the kitchen. She was always in the kitchen. Not cooking always but stationed there, presiding over the room the way a body presides over its own breathing, and she spoke to Emile now rapidly in a Spanish that belonged to a different era and he responded in attempts, circling around words, his accent perfect but the vocabulary mapped like complexities onto a child's pictures, and the bathroom was occupied, it was always occupied, and I waited in the hallway that was not a hallway but a passage between the kitchen and the bedrooms narrow enough that two people could not pass without one turning sideways without one body acknowledging the other's right to space, walls thin enough to hear everything and thick enough to pretend you couldn't, the crowd noise swelling, my uncle's single exhalation, a goal or a near miss both producing the same response the same slow release of air, and I waited, the air conditioner shuddering, cooling the apartment the way aspirin addresses a fever not by solving anything but by creating a local exception a temporary and unconvincing argument against the heat, and somewhere a faucet running, and the smell of something reheated, and Emile laughing at something on the screen, and my grandmother saying something I half-heard, and the pull-out mattress springs when someone shifted, and outside Orlando continuing.
Yaneth was my mother's cousin or my aunt's friend or both or neither. She worked at Universal five days a week and had for nine years, Yaneth, whose hands were extraordinary, raw and cracked and enormous on a woman her size, hands that had scrubbed the artifice clean so that children could believe in dinosaurs. She's the reason we could go.
The parking structure swallowed the van in dull white fluorescence. Negative brightness. Transition. We ascended the helix, passing cartoon index. Section Astrid. Section Bumblebee, in pale yellow. Finally we reached the top—it must've been busy—and the fluorescence gave way to the heat of the day and a shine that implied humidity even with the windows shut and at once I felt a kind of dread. I swallowed it. We walked across the hot concrete toward the gates. Emile beside me. Our mothers behind us. We descended and skated across those mechanical walkways, turning and moonwalking as we shuffled within the crowd. Showman. My aunt smiled, slightly.
Brief intermission through security theatre, and then the interior city folded out in front of us. It was enormous. Blue sky cut into shapes by rooflines and facades, and the mist nozzles caught the light so that for a moment everything in front of us appeared to be gently dissolving. Emile said something I didn't hear. The colours were impossible, the reds and yellows of things that want to be seen, aposematic, and the music came from no identifiable source, not a direction but a weather, a wash. I hated how beautiful it was. How well constructed it felt. The crowd dissipated into packs, circular cells splitting into arterial paths, into shops, restaurants.
A boy, about four, in a Real Madrid jersey ran the wrong way through the crowd, shin guards on for no reason, and his father trailed behind with a metal water bottle and no apparent intention of catching him. The boy stopped at some threshold only he could see and turned and waited, bouncing on his toes, and when his father caught up the boy grabbed the water and drank with his whole face, water running down his chin and darkening his collar. He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and said something and his father bent down and the boy said it again, closer, into his ear, like a secret or a threat, and his father straightened and shook his head and the boy pulled at the hem of his shirt once and then gave up with a completeness that seemed practiced. They stood there for a moment in that strange ceasefire. The boy's hair was a glittering, healthy brown with red in places and his face was round, inflated, he was beautiful and reminded me of Emile. I told him as much. He glared at me.
We separated from our mothers by the unspoken agreement of teenagers, the mutual understanding that the alternative was a specific kind of death. We had decided on Islands of Adventure earlier, something about the promise of water, of being soaked and cooled and temporarily absolved of the heat. We beelined to the disability office. I delivered my prepared speech. Urinary In-Con-tin-ence. The woman behind the counter looked at me the way a teacher looks at a student who has just asked to go to the bathroom for the third time in an hour. She didn't believe me. I could feel Emile behind me, his silence loud with the effort of suppression. She asked me what exactly the condition prevented me from doing and I said it, plainly, looking at a spot just left of her face, that I could not stand in line for long periods of time without the possibility of an accident, and the word accident hung there between us, absurd and clinical, and she stamped something and handed me an orange card and neither of us looked at the other.
The card entitled us to a time, not a line. We blitzed the park with ruthless efficiency. Mathematically traversing from node to node in an attempt to maximize all that Emile's mother had given us. Granola sequestered in our pockets, our pemmican and hardtack, we bounced between all the shorter rides as we waited.
"I want to leave."
The line wound through a constructed environment, some interior meant to resemble a laboratory or a government facility, the walls dressed with props and screens that displayed information about the fictional crisis we were about to participate in with cheerful imperative. Around us families stood in the patient daze of people who had agreed to wait as a form of leisure, and they stared at us as we sauntered through the roped sections.
"Leaving what?" with concern. "The park?"
"No. All of it."
He looked at me with a kind of bemused tolerance. I hadn't seen his father in a while, but it seemed like the genesis of such an expression. European patronization.
"Where would you go?"
"I dunno. Somewhere with hills."
He laughed. He didn't understand it but he laughed, which was generous, which was Emile, always generous. I watched him look around the fake laboratory with genuine curiosity and I understood that our positions could not be reconciled.
Finally, Hulk. We had heard it all throughout the park, the carts launched with a synthetic roar followed by the very real screams of bodies twisted and twirled through space. We arrived at the maw of the beast and the older lady looked at my card and smiled us through, and for a moment I felt a pang at my deception. The trudge up was endless, even the accelerated line was filled with enough people that had my condition been legitimate there would have been strain, my guilt acquitted. We got closer to the track where packs of bodies were herded into the slaughterhouse, and I felt legitimately excited and I felt Emile's excitement around me but also a touch of unease, and then finally we got to the line and they shipped off a pack right before us which put us in the very front of the first cart and I felt lucky but also mortified, for I had never been first. Emile took it in stride. They locked us down. Green bars ratcheting onto my lap, and it felt so very claustrophobic and I almost wished it wasn't there, to trust in the momentum to keep me in my seat like a children's science experiment. We shifted back for a barely perceptible moment as the brake disengaged and then HULK SMASH and I was accelerated into nothingness like a particle in an adult's science experiment and I thought of the first house I had lived in with my uncle and his ex-wife and how they were fused back together despite, and now because of, a previous fission and the predictable explosion and the texture of screams all around me, Emile had attempted a stoic brace beforehand but he folded so quickly it was its own kind of whiplash, and I heard his voice break a little and it made me laugh but of course he didnt have the energy for a glare in the face of this blinding light, my uncle's son never had energy for glares he was all pout and who could blame him, my uncles other son beyond pout as he had dared to love, but my fathers face was all pout and I missed and longed for him and click click click and we ratcheted upwards briefly in some false suspense but it was relentless and we plummeted back down again and I wanted to feel his embrace again to feel the compression of his arms against my skin and to turn off my brain and feel safe and secure and bank right and emile screamed, a legitimate scream of joy, the kind that empties you and I was envious, jealous beyond belief, and we corkscrewed and I felt my spine compress and I felt nothing like a child and I felt nothing like his child and the track straightened and the brakes came on in a long mechanical exhale and it was over and it was not enough and emile was laughing and shaking and alive and I was too but differently
SHORT STORY 3
Today I went to visit the man without a memory. The ward was constructed as you'd expect. Drab. Gray. The platonic ideal of depressive, repressive architecture. Its most interesting feature was a uniform cantilever halfway up, as if it had been constructed on a tiny parcel and only by invading others' airspace could it accommodate the internal empire.
The man without a memory was too, how you would expect. How it happened is unknown, but one imagines a construction accident. Pipe through the skull, coring out a portion of the hippocampus, a researcher taking the arctic's memories with him with a bore. Or perhaps it was a brain-eating bacteria. Or maybe the sin was more original, a genetic malformation that triggered at some inopportune moment.
Regardless, he was always rather lucid in the moment. I went up the elevator. He was on the first floor-the other floors serving some other public purpose-but the elevator accelerated as if it was going to the tenth floor all the same, blood rushing to my head and then back down to my feet. Red out.
Inside the ward was slightly more inviting. More than you'd expect, anyway. Mildly midcentury, warm lighting, carpet shifted from vermillion to burgundy with age. Somewhat of an American caricature, like an old diner or a hotel lobby from a film about the fifties that was itself made in the seventies.
He was sitting by the window when I arrived. Same chair as always, though he wouldn't know that. The attendant nodded me in and left us alone.
"Hello," I said.
He turned. His face cycled through calibrations: surprise, alarm, something approaching joy. "First visitor in twenty years."
I'd heard this before. "How do you know?"
"Mirror." He touched his jaw. "Erosion. I remember being young. Now I'm not."
"Your name?"
"Of course." Slight smile. "I'm not stupid. Just very specifically broken."
I sat. "You can still speak."
"Language is spinal. Piano hands. You forget practice but the fingers move." He flexed them. "I mean-I don't forget practice. I never remember it. Different thing."
We sat in silence for a moment. Out the window, the city sprawled in its typical industrial indifference.
"I need to tell you something," I said. "About my daughter."
He turned to me with complete attention. A blank page.
"Amanda's twenty-six now. Works in graphic design-or she did, last I heard directly from her, which was three months ago. We used to talk every Sunday. Like clockwork. I'd call her after breakfast, she'd tell me about her week, her projects, whatever guy she was seeing at the time. Mostly I'd listen. That was the agreement we'd settled into, though neither of us ever said it explicitly. I'd listen, I'd offer advice when asked, I'd tell her I loved her before we hung up.
"Then last November she asked if we could add her mother to Thanksgiving. Just the three of us. She said it casually, like she was asking to bring a bottle of wine. I was quiet for a long time. You know that kind of quiet where you can hear the other person breathing on the line, where the silence itself becomes a kind of statement? Finally I said, 'I don't think that's a good idea.'
"She asked why not. I told her that her mother had made certain choices, that forgiveness wasn't the same as reconciliation, that some doors close and should stay closed. That Thanksgiving was our tradition, mine and hers, and had been for fifteen years, and bringing her mother into it would change what it meant. I said it would be dishonest.
"Amanda got very quiet too. Then she said, 'Dad, she was sick.' I said I knew that. Depression, I said, is a real illness, I'm not disputing that. But being sick doesn't absolve you of the consequences of your actions. If an alcoholic crashes their car, we can acknowledge the disease and still recognize the damage.
"'She didn't crash a car,' Amanda said. 'She got depressed and you left her.'
"'She left us,' I said. 'Emotionally. Checked out completely. Do you remember those months? I'd come home and she'd be in bed. You'd be sitting on the floor in front of the TV eating cereal for dinner because she couldn't be bothered to get up. A mother's first responsibility is to her child. She failed that responsibility.'
"Amanda was crying by then. I could hear it in her breathing. She said, 'You're talking about her like she's a stranger. Like she didn't raise me for twelve years before that happened.'
"'Thirteen years,' I corrected her. 'And I'm talking about her like someone who understands that love is a verb, not just a feeling. You can feel all the love in the world, but if you can't get out of bed to feed your daughter, what does it matter?'
"She hung up on me. Didn't call the next Sunday. Or the one after that. Three months now. I've left messages. Texts. Nothing aggressive, nothing angry. Just checking in. She's read them-you can see that now, the little read receipts-but she doesn't respond."
I stopped. The man without a memory was looking at me with intense focus.
"That's very painful," he said.
"Yes."
"Were you right? About Thanksgiving?"
"I was honest."
He looked at his hands. Turned them over. "Being honest."
"Yes."
"What did your daughter do for Thanksgiving?"
"I don't know. I spent it alone."
He nodded. We watched the light change outside. A plane passed, silent through the glass.
"Actually," I said, "that's not quite how it happened. The Thanksgiving thing was there, but what really ended it was the money. This was in January. Amanda called-she'd been distant since November but was still talking to me-and she said her mother was in trouble. Behind on rent, about to be evicted. Asked if I could lend her five thousand dollars.
"I laughed. Not a cruel laugh, just-automatic. Surprised. 'You're asking me to give money to your mother?' I said. 'The same woman who spent a year and a half barely able to work, who I supported through all of that, who then decided she needed to "find herself" and left?'
"'Dad,' Amanda said, 'she's going to be homeless.'
"'She has a sister. She has friends. She has, presumably, some kind of job, even if she can't manage to keep up with rent. Why is this my problem?'
"'Because I'm asking you,' Amanda said. 'Because I'm your daughter and I'm asking you to help someone I love.'
"I got angry then. Really angry. I told her that I'd spent fifteen years building a life for the two of us, that I'd worked sixty-hour weeks at a job I hated to make sure she could go to college without debt, that I'd sacrificed my own relationship possibilities because I didn't want to confuse her with a parade of stepmother candidates. I'd earned my money. I'd earned my peace. And I wasn't going to subsidize the same woman who'd abandoned us.
"'She didn't abandon us,' Amanda said. 'You keep saying that but it's not true. She got sick and you couldn't handle it, so you left her. And then you spent fifteen years making sure I understood that was somehow her fault.'
"That's when I said it. The thing I regret. I said, 'If you can't see the difference between a sick person and a bad mother, then I've failed you more completely than she ever did.'
"She said, 'You haven't failed me, Dad. But you're not the person I thought you were.' And she hung up.
"I sent the money the next day. Five thousand dollars, directly to her mother's account. I thought it would fix things. Amanda sent it back. Included a note: 'She doesn't need it anymore. I gave her the money myself. I was asking because I wanted to know what kind of person you are. Now I know.'"
The man without a memory was still looking at me. Something different in his face now. More careful. Or less.
"You changed the story," he said.
"Same story. Different details."
"No." He shook his head once. "Different story."
I didn't answer. A nurse walked by in the hallway, shoes squeaking on linoleum. The sound seemed to catch his attention, then release it.
"The truth is," I said, "neither of those versions is quite right. Amanda's mother didn't leave us. I left her. After the depression got bad-after the first suicide attempt, the hospitalization, the weeks where she could barely speak-I couldn't take it anymore. Not because I didn't love her. I did. But I was terrified. Terrified that Amanda would come home from school one day and find her mother dead. Terrified that I'd wake up next to a corpse. Terrified that I'd say the wrong thing and it would be the thing that tipped her over.
"So I made a decision. I told her I was taking Amanda and moving out. Just temporarily, I said. Just until you get better. Just until things stabilize. I'd bring Amanda to visit every weekend. We'd do family dinners. But I needed to know Amanda was safe, and I couldn't trust that in that house, with her, anymore.
"She begged me not to. Said she needed us there. Said she was trying. But I'd already rented the apartment. I'd already enrolled Amanda in a new school, closer to my office. I'd already made up my mind.
"She did get better, eventually. Medication, therapy, electroconvulsive treatment finally. Took two years. By then Amanda and I had our routines. Our Sunday calls. Our Thanksgiving tradition. Her mother would try to insert herself back in-birthday cards, Christmas presents, invitations to coffee-and I never forbade Amanda from seeing her. I was very careful about that. Very correct. But I'd make observations. Little things. 'Your mother seems tired today, doesn't she? I hope she's taking care of herself.' Or, 'Did she remember to pick you up on time? Good, good. I just worry.' Or my favorite: 'I'm so glad you're stable, sweetheart. That you don't have her emotional... fragility.'
"I was planting seeds. Making sure Amanda understood that her mother was fundamentally unreliable. Damaged. And that I- I was the one who'd saved her from all that.
"When Amanda asked me for the money, she wasn't asking for rent. Her mother was trying to go back to school. Community college, nursing degree. She wanted to restart her life. Amanda wanted to help her. And I said no because I wanted her mother to fail. I wanted Amanda to watch her fail. I wanted vindication for every anxious night, every moment of terror, every sacrifice I'd made. I wanted Amanda to see that I'd been right all along to leave."
I stopped.
The man without a memory looked at me for a long time. Or what seemed like a long time. Hard to tell if he was thinking or if the thought had already passed through and out.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you won't remember."
"No." He was very still. "But you will."
We sat there. The afternoon light slanted through the window, catching dust motes in its amber geometry.
"You keep changing it," he said finally. "Each time different."
"I'm trying to find-"
"The one that makes sense?" He looked at his hands again. Studied them like artifacts. "I do that too. Every morning I try to remember how I got here. Make up stories. Car accident one day. War injury the next. Fell off a building. Brain tumor. Stroke." He turned his hands over. "Doesn't matter which story I pick. I'm still here when I wake up."
He smiled, but it was distant. Already drifting.
"The story doesn't change it," he said. "What you did. What happened." He paused, and for a moment his eyes focused with surprising clarity. "You came here because I can't judge you. Can't hold it against you. Ten seconds and it's gone." Another pause. "But you'll still have said it. You'll remember saying it. To someone. That's what you needed."
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
The ferry rattled me. It had been a while since I had been on a boat, and even then, never on the open ocean. I suppose that's not quite the truth. My grandparents took me on a deep sea fishing trip once. I must've been about 6. Run by some tourist enterprise. Somewhere in Florida. First they trailed big nets behind us and had us process the shrimp. Squeezing the little buggers to remove the heads. Taking out the spinal cord. Then we cast thin lines into the sea. It felt like they caught hundreds of red snapper as a group. I watched them die in a bucket. Red to white and then red again. When we got back, an older, sinewy man with yellow gloves and a menthol cigarette dangling from his lips processed the catch for us. We took home shapeless fillets. Like they hadn't ever been alive. The ferry lulled me back and forth. Nauseating. I was supposed to go to Mykonos with Kostas, a man I met at an Athens bar, drunk on red donkeys, face flush with courage. He said he hadn't ever been himself. He came down with the flu yesterday. I carried on. We pulled into the harbor, multiples of small white buildings along the circumference of the bay. Dense groupings of plaster prisms. Nothing like graffitied Athens. We exited with a frantic energy. Everyone around me was young, rich, primarily German and English. I caught bits of French too. Rugby lads and their tiny girlfriends. I packed into the stream as we shifted down the metal ramp. The rumble of suitcase wheels onto diamonds gave way to a more uniform chorus of clicks and bumps across cobblestone. My slung canvas bag bounced with my stride. I brought almost nothing. Looking at a salt-encrusted map of the city, I noticed beach clubs named in superlative succession. Grand Beach Club. Paradise Beach Club. Super Paradise Beach Club. A tiny cab failed to start, the driver cursing at the wheel. Young women in the backseat, barely clothed, visibly confused. Without Kostas I had no program. I started walking. First the maze. Souvenir shops. Designer handbags. Soon the alleyways widened into streets, the town partitioned into grids of hotels. People zipped around on rented ATVs. Electric blue and neon green. I watched two of them almost crash. Both operators drunk on the heat of the Aegean day. I decided to walk as the crow flies to the beach. Slowly the island's character revealed herself. Dry brush crackling underneath my feet. Winds swirling. Beyond the yachts in the distance and the buildings hugging the coast, it felt as if I was at the end of the world. Every few hundred meters I vaulted over a low cobblestone wall. Further on I came across a series of concrete boxes, half open. A construction project gone awry, perhaps. There was a man in one of them. Lying down, slumped. Deep-set eyes, matted beard. He looked at me, or perhaps beyond me, but said no words. I carried on. Eventually I made it to the first of the beach clubs. I heard it first. A low rumble that turned into the thumping of music and cheers. It spread out below me like something spilled. Meat market. Bodies grinding. A topless woman got up on top of a table and started to scream. I pushed through the sea of people. Someone looked at me inquisitively, as if to say "what are you doing here, baby." I left the rumble. Back into the desert. I started to tire, the brush wearing me thin. I stumbled. Hot blood welled out of my palms, dripping as I continued. A breadcrumb trail. There was a ramshackle hut in front of me. A bare mattress against one of the walls, fenced-in chickens clucking in mocking bursts. The ground got rockier, and then smoother. Another club. This time I tried to buy a bottle of water from a girl who must've been about a year younger than me. She looked at me with a sort of mutual understanding, as if she knew I must've come from around the bend. She handed me the bottle for free. I continued plummeting through contrast. I had been plodding for hours. After the fifth club I noticed the heat of the day subsiding; the light was starting to give. I took the bus back to the bay. I had no change, and the driver shuffled me along regardless, with no patience for explanation. The rapture continued in motion. Men and women shouting at each other, lips peeling and locking. The bus went down a steep, switchbacked, north-bearing road, the low angle of the sun blinding the driver with every second turn. More screaming. He had hit somebody. We stopped. I got out. A man lay crumpled in front of the vehicle, shirtless, one arm bent wrong. People leaned over him. Someone was crying. I stood there long enough to see his chest moving, then turned and walked the rest. The screaming followed. Into the harbor. Into the hostel. Rattling inside me.
the ground was rather dark, hydrated, mushy brown, the type you could stare into as it engulfed the tread of your boots and then some, riding up past the red painted belly of a ship, dangerously edging upon the planned state of affairs. waterproof uppers. had sprayed them with questionable lacquer, off brand rain-x, my t-shirt pressed against mouth and nose, hoping cotton sufficed as shield against a shield. probably reorganizing my cells into something less compatible with life but whatever, the boots stayed dry mostly.
mud gave way to concrete. the car had finally crapped out, some old shitbox always leaking something, producing great billowing gray clouds, spring weather minus the green, painted red. long walks now but peace and quiet necessary, right? given the lack of glass in my back passenger window, exposure to elements came in stages. weaned off shelter's security like, i don't know, like those baby birds pushed incrementally toward the ledge by mothers who've had enough.
that window didn't shatter so much as surrender. splintered constellation birthed from single determined impact point, glass seemingly holding form in defiance before collapsing inward like a tired argument. i'd like to think it had that moment of agency against its aggressor but i didn't actually see it happen. sunday, or could've been any day, time having lost its rigid demarcations in the building where radiators hissed secrets in morse and fluorescent lights flickered back in epileptic protest. occasionally whispering shakespeare or polish obscenities. monkey-typewriter situation, infinity producing hamlet or whatever.
mrs. abernathy would swear it was the ghost of her old man though she'd say this clutching rosary beads, plastic clicking against nicotine stained fingernails like tiny insect mandibles. the landlord blamed neighborhood elements, euphemism as transparent as the window once was, which is to say slightly opaque, considering the neighborhood was overwhelmingly white. truth was surely stranger. the vehicle clearly not worth robbing, i mean look at it.
her television was the metronome. game shows at volumes suggesting determined resistance to hearing loss, to entropy itself, to the heat death of the universe. the ambient hum of her ancient air purifier keeping the particles, enunciated pejoratively, at bay. the perpetual argument between her cat and whatever demons it perceived in corners. white noise as companionship, background radiation a friend you never wanted but got anyway.
stairwell greeted me, familiar five note melody reliable as anything, augmented now with squish squish squish of not quite waterproof shoes marking ascent to third floor sanctuary. hallway a tunnel of identical doors save hers, adorned with seasonal wreaths never aligning with actual season. plastic poinsettias- april's insistence outside going completely unacknowledged, her door living in some other calendar system entirely, liturgical maybe, k-mart clearance cyclical.
noticed the silence first.
no television. no air purifier. cat's theological disputes ceased. even the radiators seemed to be holding their breath, morse code interrupted mid sentence, waiting. my key slid into lock with usual reluctance but i paused, attention caught by thin ribbon of something dark seeping beneath her doorframe. not water. too viscous, too deliberate in its advance across worn carpet. that particular rusty quality the body recognizes before mind can properly name it, ancient mammalian hindbrain firing alerts in a language predating language, predating anything civilized.
knocked anyway. three times. sound fell flat against the door, as if space beyond had become infinite, vacuum unable to carry vibration. my knuckles rapping against the event horizon of something that had already happened, already finished happening, just the aftermath leaking under the door now.
landlord took seventeen minutes. counted each second watching the clock at hallway's end advance with indifferent precision. several hours off of course but who cares, only thing of consequence this moment and the next. he spoke little, fumbling master key, a man accustomed to leaky faucets and late payments, unprepared for genuine tragedy, for bodies that stop being tenants and become problems of a different administrative category entirely.
door swung open.
mrs. abernathy splayed across floral armchair like discarded marionette, strings cut by whoever operates these things, stage manager of the universe calling it a wrap. rosary beads scattered across linoleum, tiny plastic galaxies against universe of blood pooled and begun its slow pilgrimage toward the hall. tectonic drift of bodily fluids seeking lower ground, patient as geology, indifferent as gravity. television remote clutched in one hand. warrior entombed with sword, dying as she lived: in control of the volume at least.
room smelled of copper and white diamonds perfume. olfactory chord i didn't know i was capable of filing away under permanent. so it goes.
two days before i could sleep, missing the noise like a shanghainese schoolboy tilling the gobi, sent to countryside during some vague revolution, only distraction from thoughts the soft hum of locusts and swirling wind and the general impossibility of everything. that's not quite right but close enough, you get it. point is the silence was worse than the noise ever was, absence louder than presence. funny how that works. how much do i ignore that i'd rather actually observe? her game shows, apparently. wheel of fortune as lullaby.
landlord already posted for rent sign on her door. entrepreneurial pragmatism recovering faster than human empathy, capitalism's grotesque efficiency on display. caught him earlier scrubbing hallway carpet, knees pressed into wet fibers, working the stain with visible discomfort. uncertain rhythm of someone following instructions they hoped they'd never need, youtube video about blood removal probably, comment section full of questions nobody wants to answer. carpet remained discolored. shadow of occurrence reduced to less morbid explanations, spilled drink perhaps, wine, beet juice, something innocent enough that prospective tenants wouldn't know to look for ghosts in fibers, wouldn't think to ask why that particular patch was lighter, why the landlord's hands shook when he pointed out the building's charming vintage character.
never even met her, he said, nephew's coming tomorrow for her things, doesn't want the furniture. gestured broadly toward unit as if i'd want to adopt the traumatized la-z-boy, blood witness recliner, floral print conspiracy theorist. he stood, knees cracking like wet kindling trying to remember how to be dry.
ran into nephew later, him cradling large box and pet carrier, cat inside delivering chorus of hisses. aggravated snake, bitten tire, demon experiencing routine exorcism against its will. the nephew himself older than me, salt and pepper hair, slightly overweight, outfits sourced from typical wellsprings of male indifference. costco flannel. white undershirt managing to appear faded despite complete lack of color, an achievement really, fading white into whiter, achieving negative brightness. struggled to imagine what objects he'd grabbed from her flat, their venn diagram more discount bicycle than circle, two rings tenuously connected by obligation, genetics, the accident of shared dna and absolutely nothing else.
mrs. abernathy was many things but never boring, right? vehemently catholic except for ouija board stowed atop refrigerator, reserved for when tired by futility of christian prayer. when rosary beads failed to connect the call, when god's customer service line kept her on hold too long. its purpose: speak to her beloved. not late husband, the veteran, she'd say, like it was job title, something that happened to him in some unspecified conflict, the war, always capitalized in her voice, but fleeting memory of truck driver who wooed her once, twice, thrice passing through i-90. meeting unfortunate end via common brake failure in mack b2x-e.
she spoke in general terms about everything. the war. my show. the store. last two of great importance, capitalized in speech somehow. my show, love boat reruns, tape thinning like patience, like the space between what happened and what she wished had happened, magnetic particles reorganizing themselves into static, into snow, into white noise that sounded like ocean if you squinted your ears.
the wreath came down three days later. that's when i knew she was really gone, door naked now, just 3b. number without character, waiting for whoever could ignore the stain and the fact that silence rings louder than noise ever did. that game shows sound wrong coming from wrong apartment, wrong television, operated by someone who never needed volume quite that high, who never fought hearing loss with sheer wattage, with aggressive deployment of pat sajak.
Short story 2.
Santa Verónica lay in stupor, ochre dust and pale light languid through. Heat not merely temperature but thick presence, woolly, shrouding the soul. Time kicked from its trajectory, revolving- a condor circling over carrion.
The carpenter tired, the saw's rhythm slowing to ragged breath over the day's heat. Since dawn he laboured, hands blistered from sweat inside his gloves, macerated. The cut wood would become a door, a door for a house that would stand empty, for lack of those to fill the houses that already stood.
The day was done, he walked to the town square where gypsies had arrived, a dying lineage who still peddled promises of a mysterious world. But Santa Verónica had no more room to be enchanted by the curious, nor by the silk kites that refused to fly in the stagnant air, nor by the binocular whose extended sight only revealed misery. The gypsies begged and pleaded in the derelict square where cobblestones were missing like the memory of rain, where the fountain had been dry for so long that children thought it had always been merely decorative, a stone monument to the idea of water, choking on dry leaves.
He went home, and the memory of his love clouded his vision, her hand missing on his cheek but wondering also about a particular distance she had cultivated in those final months, a remoteness that seemed to require great effort to overcome even for a moment. Her affection was merely a charade she could only maintain when energized, a performance that exhausted her? They had married young, as people did in those days, and perhaps he had been most of hers, until he wasn't.
At the market the food was scarce and what remained had little air of rot about it, vegetables collapsing into themselves as if trying to disappear entirely. The shopkeeper, a severe man whose severity seemed the only thing keeping him upright, explained that there was drought in the arable areas beyond the mountains, that the earth itself had decided to stop giving. The carpenter purchased what he could with coins that felt lighter each time he spent them, and had another negative interaction with his landlord who lived in the adjacent room and who seemed to believe that proximity granted him certain rights to complaint and accusation.
That night he dreamed about his wife weeping alone in a corner of their room, hands covering her face as if her grief were something obscene that needed hiding. When he lifted her chin she stared at him without a thread of recognition, as though he were a stranger who had wandered into the wrong dream, into the wrong life entirely.
Work again. The saw moved through pine and the hours moved through him and by afternoon storm clouds rolled in for the first time in an age, black and heavy with the promise they had forgotten how to keep. Water ran through the town in torrents as he ran home, and he stood at the window watching the streets transform into rivers, watching the dust become mud become something almost fertile. Time passed in the gray constancy of rain. Late that night his landlord returned, and the carpenter heard the door swing open and shut with a weight that seemed wrong, and slept to the sound of water drumming its fingers on the roof.
The next day was the Feast of San Cristóbal and he had no work. In the town the gypsies had vanished as gypsies always did, only leaving the memory of themselves and wheel ruts already filling with rainwater. Near the church he overheard men speaking of a jaguar that had been seen at the edges of the mountains, moving through the rain with purpose, and he thought nothing of it because men in Santa Verónica were always seeing things that weren't there, or perhaps seeing things that were there but shouldn't be.
At the market the shopkeeper's wife stood behind the counter, and when he asked where her husband was she said he was recovering from illness, though the carpenter had seen him as himself the day before, the strength of his severity supported by a starting selection of the towns produce, exercising the privileges of ownership. The carpenter bought dried beans and stale bread and went home.
His landlord was there with his face wrapped in bandages, gauze wound round and round like a cocoon from which something terrible might emerge. The landlord launched into a self-congratulatory soliloquy about being chosen, about receiving truth, about how the jaguar had come to him in the rain and confirmed what he had always known, that he was just in his character and righteous in his beliefs, that his grievances were holy and his anger sanctified by forces beyond human judgment.
On the second day of the holiday he returned to town and saw that more people had been wrapped in gauze, the poor unbandaged and raw, pieces of their faces simply gone as if carefully excised by a surgeon or a priest performing some necessary removal. And yet there was an almost religious calm over everything, the wounded moving through the streets with expressions of beatific certainty, as though the absence of their flesh had revealed something essential.
He spoke with the cobbler's son, a boy who had been rejected from the vocational school for illiteracy and who now had a gash in his cheek deep enough to expose the white of his molars. The boy said that the jaguar had revealed to him the word of God, and that tomorrow he would begin preaching in the square, and his voice was thick with conviction and blood. The shopkeeper, returned to his post with his jaw bandaged, explained that the jaguar had given him knowledge of when the rains would come to the south, that his stock would be bountiful, that he had traded his face for futures.
The carpenter began to wonder about the divinity of the jaguar, and the ultimate question that had been weighing on him took new form. Perhaps this creature, whatever it was, could tell him whether his wife had truly loved him as he had loved her, could answer the question that had no answer in the ordinary world.
He worked for three more days, and on the evening of the third day found his landlord collapsed on the floor of the adjacent room, door hanging open. When he peeled back the bandages he discovered that almost nothing remained, that the landlord had been transformed into something mummified, a muscular form from which the organic shell had been carefully removed.
And yet the question persisted.
He went to the edge of town where the mountains began, following the path others must have taken. There he found her, not an animal but an amalgamated statue constructed of sewn human skin, a patchwork deity puppeted from somewhere inside, moving with the terrible grace of something that had learned to be alive. The jaguar smiled loudly.
"What would you like to know?", in a voice like rain.
The carpenter asked his question, the one he had carried since before his wife died, perhaps since before she had married him: "Did she love me as I did her? Did my wife truly love me, or was it only façade?"
The jaguar considered this with what remained of other people's eyes, and then it spoke, offering nothing more than a platitude, the kind of wisdom found in barbershop almanacs: "Love is what we make of it, the effort we put forth. She stayed with you, didn't she? That is love enough."
Men emerged from behind him with a straight razor, their movements ritualistic and inevitable, and they removed part of his face with the precision of those who had done this many times before. And yet the carpenter felt content with the simplicity of the answer, despite understanding clearly that it was ridiculous, that it was nothing dressed as revelation, because it had pacified the question that had been eating him alive, had given him a story he could tell himself about his wife and his life and the meaning of both. The simplicity of the answer, however banal, had pacified the storm in his mind.
He went home through streets where others walked with their faces wrapped, went home to the room where his wife was not and never would be again, and discovered that he could live with not knowing, now that he had been told he knew, having felt the peace of the mutilated.
Every now and then I feel the urge to get all uppity and leave maybe more than now and then the feeling can be all-consuming like an instinct to sprout dandelion tufts and scatter my messages to sea never to be read, the ocean is blue or green or Homer's wine-dark but that's outside this park I mean the letting-go, standing still while the water works on you erodes you like an estuary with teeth, that's how I learned to read I think letting shapes settle on my skull and press their small indentations slowly cutting grooves like a lathe or a stenographer taking down testimony, the records are a little dusty though I blow on them sometimes the way you'd blow on dice for luck or birthday candles for half forgotten wishes, what comes up is childhood the smell of construction paper pva paste in those little bottles with orange lids specimen jars for elementary school taxonomies the alphabet marching across the top of the whiteboard, tiny immigration each letter a small country I had to visit had to be visited by really, they came knocking with their own weather systems jetstreams and dead air, their own rules about when to be silent K was a particularly rude guest would show up with N and just stand there arms crossed saying nothing bailiff in the courtroom of pronunciation but S, S was the ocean again wasn't it the shape your mouth makes when you're trying to keep a secret or testing the temperature of something too hot, sibilant they called it later which felt putting a name to wind calling a hurricane Susan, by then reading had stopped being decoding had become something else standing in the park at dusk when the sprinklers come on and everyone's already gone home, letting the words soak through cotton white until you can't tell what's text and what's skin or maybe skin is text has been all along, tattooed with instructions we can't quite make out in this light which is always this light isn't it the same compromised twilight whether we're seven or seventy-seven dimmer switch stuck at ecclesiastical ambiance, rap on the door timed to cliché, call to action, what is it this time, he always has an imperative to go along with the remark, improv artist, yes and why don't we, but also dentist with that little mirror poking around in the soft places or a land surveyor measuring property lines in my temporal lobe, I open the door a crack and let his sentence wedge its shoe in he's wearing that same uniform of urgency neon verbs reflective nouns he's here to redirect traffic in my head or maybe he is traffic himself a whole vascular network of obligations pulsing we're moving he says without saying it we're always moving I answer by not answering, holding the knob you hold a kite string when you're pretending to let go but really you're just feeding out more line, seeing how far the thing will climb before it realizes it's still tethered, walked into the exhale of the hallway air brushing my back towards the vacuum of expectation following his steps, tempted to step on the back of his heel or mockingly imitate his stride what children do when they're working out what adulthood looks from the outside which is the only place you can see it from really, trying to understand a chrysalis by staring at the shell or maybe by becoming the shell, I forget which, he's talking of course, his mouth moves with the confidence of someone who's never had to wonder if anyone's listening elevators move with confidence that someone pressed a button somewhere somnambulant certainty of machinery, and that's why we need to be there by three he's saying, which tells me nothing because I missed the predicate, the whole premise, I walked in during the second act when the protagonist's already in trouble but you don't know why, joining a séance mid-incantation and everyone's holding hands already, the circle is closed, I could ask him to repeat it but that would be admitting I'd wandered off again had left my body there nodding at intervals while my mind went to check on other things whether I'd locked the door or if that pigeon outside had only one foot or two or whether pigeons have a union or whether unions dream of pigeons we push through the double doors or single door really the other door is there for some greater function besides entrance and exit, some eschatological purpose, I leave it alone with religious reverence clearly the decision of some higher power appendix or tailbone or the way grocery stores always have that one register that's never open just there as a confessional maybe or a monument to the idea of service, his car is the gray one they're all gray really even the red ones look gray in this light parking structures everywhere a kind of purgatorial fluorescence makes everyone look recovering from something we're all convalescing from the same unnamed malady, and he's already got his keys out jangling them question I'm supposed to answer, coins in a cup loose teeth or castanets for a flamenco we're not dancing, you coming or what, drove on the overpass on the way into the city the imperfect joinery between sections giving impressions of its own rhythm, off beat from the music girl interrupted with a loud cathunk and then another cathunk city's heartbeat or the sound of someone drumming their fingers on a table waiting for you to get to the point metronome with arrhythmia or just regular arrhythmia no metronome involved actually, do you ever try to match up your turn signal with the guy in front, what, the blinker I say, pointing uselessly at the Toyota ahead of us having indicated its desire to turn left for the past half mile or maybe its entire life, the rhythm, trying to sync it up, walking behind someone and you try to step in time with them, make it seem intentional, some kind of sympathetic resonance or parasitic, I can't remember which, he looks at me people look at the wheels of a grocery cart when something's gone awry inconvenient impossible to fix, perhaps worth switching out or just living with the wobble for the next twenty minutes, you live with tinnitus or tinnitus lives with you, the symbiosis unclear, no he says flatly, which is its own kind of music percussive thud of a conversation ending before it began gavel or a guillotine, the road slows as the lanes constrict into the confines of the city, or the city's mouth really, swallowing us, it swallows everyone who thinks they're just passing through, plankton with ambitions, and ahead there's a billboard for something I can't quite read from this distance but it doesn't matter, billboards are all the same promise really, the promise that if you buy the thing or go to the place you'll become the kind of person who doesn't need to buy things or go places, you'll just be enough, or maybe not enough, maybe something else entirely, a third option nobody mentioned, and the light changes from red to green but we're not moving yet, everyone's still sitting there like we're all waiting for a different signal, a permission that comes from somewhere other than the municipal traffic authority, a deeper green, a more convincing red
Here and now! (best read aloud). subject matter is kinda cliche. Dont usually write lyrical stuff but it was fun to think of the compound rhymes.
The news-noose tightens round' the messenger's neck, mess-anger spilling from the static attic where panic attacks the manic.
I’m no cosmic courier, just a thought-knotted augur, caught in rough troughs of doubt; I sift drifted motives, riffs of mis-gifted notes that float, then throat-choke out: gloat.
You were cable-able once, table-stable in the prefrontal cradle; now cadence caves, braided waves invade and fade the laid-out label, Cain an' Abel- pain and fable.
The under-mind’s mine hums, drums of rumbling numbers, mum-murmurs tunneling under slumber, plundered wonders thunder.
Memory-wires fire embroidery inside. I ride slide-sides of pride that hide behind collide-tides, indexing vexing hexes in cortex annexes.
Each impulse pulls dull gulls of comfort over rough buffer; thought traffic hacks its own static, manic-panic loops but stoops into intimate topics.
Still traceable-embraceable-erasable, the power towers within, twin spins of grin-thin sin begin to pin the din, then dim.
Communication becomes communion: quiet riots pilot diets of private climates; I rewrite night’s bite-fights until insight lights the tight sight.
When signals dwindle they kindle subtler drums; the hum becomes crumbs I thumb through, new clues glued to bruised views.
[inspired by mf doom, obviously]
Sundial
Top down light. Theres a lot of kinds. Top down, Lights! - boudoir photo shoot. Top down, light - top chop shop slogan. Top down, lite - discount top chop shop slogan. But im most interested in the top down light that occurs at high noon in places like ecuador, or ecuatorial guniea, or any other place on the earths belt that isnt named for it specifically. ( i have since realized that due to earths tilt this does not occur at the equator but instead at about 23.4 degrees north or south, hence the term lahaina noon, named for lahaina hawaii). Everything looks like a poorly rendered video game, or like when you were a kid and put a toy in the bathtub underwater and it seemed to be cartoonishly flat. I like the idea of complex events removing information. Usually flatness is unintentional, or a symtom of a lack of budget or whatever, at least artistically. Maybe not for concrete pourers or roof installers or computer chip builders. I stand corrected, flatness is rather rare, its noise that isnt. It all comes back to noise. Anyway, overhead light, the world looks rendered poorly or whatever and then you see the people. Noses casting shadows down the face, cheeks hollow. everyone looks gaunt at high noon, especially with the sweat of the heat. Of course, bodybuilders prefer overhead light, makes their striations pop and their viens defined, but everyone else hates it. The recently bedded especially . Im not actually much of a lamp person. I mean, I have a few lamps in my room and sometimes Ill turn them on to read if I have allusions about being quaint, rain pitter pattering overhead, symbols illuminated by the warm dull glow of incandescent filament filtered by a plaid lamp shade... etc etc. normally though the lights stay off completely, my room instead filled with the light coming from my window whose blinds I cant quite close. too high up, and too far away from my loft's edge to reach. makes me wake up at sunrise every day, id say with the birds but I have to drive aways to see them. surrounded by concrete without the people, not even crumbs for pigeons. Just office building after office building. maybe thats why I think about light, being awake when most people are sleeping, watching the sun creep across glass facades that reflect nothing back but more glass, more concrete, more of the same geometric repetition that makes you forget what organic shapes look like. The shadows move but theyre predictable, mathematical, like someone plotted them on graph paper and said "here, this is where darkness goes at 7:23 PM" Its not mysterious shadows, the kind that dance and shift and hide things. Its administrative shadow, bureaucratic darkness that knows its place and stays there until the sun moves exactly twelve degrees and then shifts accordingly. slow rotation of the sun across identical surfaces, marking time like a very expensive, very boring clock.
Short Story 1
He sits imprisoned in a foreign land, unknown vegetation under his feet, prickly, with a patronizing hostility, punishing those unaware of what is and what isn't. Men converse in strange tongues, lashing at each other with fricatives and guttural sounds from the deep recesses of their throats, ironically, likely uttering mundane actions, pleasantries, or anything uncharacteristic of the harsh wall of noise emanating from their mouths. The climate is cold, yet with a powerful sun, such that the world is momentarily plunged into an ashen winter depending on the clouds overhead, a nebulous reel of film modifying god's sunnier projections. The boy walks quietly along the white walls that enclose him with a languid expression on his face. He watches the other members of his entrapped clade toiling for as much as he can bear, then tries to dream as much as possible in an attempt to escape from the desolate reality that restrains him.
He has no memory of a prior experience, or from whence he could have come, possessing only the most rudimentary understanding of the local vernacular, enough to express desire for elementary substances: water, food. The other members, despite their suffering, care for him with a pitiful curiosity, and the wardens turn a blind eye to the ghost which encircles the world.
Once, in the boy's scanning of the walls which enclose them, he discovers a particular dark patch on the expanse of usually uniform concrete. Upon closer inspection, the patch comes into focus as a matrix of small painted strokes, and upon even closer inspection, the boy becomes surprised by his ability to comprehend such a random assortment of symbols. They speak of hope and splendor, of sorrow and tragedy, of love and hate, words that feel familiar yet unattributable, like the blurry recollection of a face one might have met, a reflection in water. Fragments of great tomes and scripture, some extensive record of a humanity reduced and flattened to some region of scrawled text, things past. Picking up a charred stick from the ground, he inscribes a reply, and begins the trudge to the glorious goal of slumber.
Over the course of years, they engage in their quiet conversation, leaving messages for the other to read. His correspondent writes of what had been, and he writes of what continues to be. As the boy becomes imbued with the context of history, of himself, he begins to age, flattened time expressing itself within the body, the awakening of some ancient, dormant pathogen. The boy, now the man, becomes more extensive with the length of his replies, the wall covered in miles of symbols, as if some mythological spider had danced around the perimeter with brushes attached to its legs, eventually becoming so densely overlapping that the walls seem to be entirely covered in random noise, only intelligible by those who constructed it.
The man becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of his correspondent with the zeal of an individual who finally tastes what they have missed, severed serene solitude. Denying himself his once prized sleep more and more, hoping to catch them in the act. Only when he finally succumbs to exhaustion does he discover another portion of the wall layered in barely intelligible script, and once he finally musters the ability to remain vigilant throughout the entire course of the night, the replies cease entirely.
The man’s insomnia becomes permanent, try as he might to atone for prior obsessions. As the mind becomes more and more exhausted, he begins to forget the meaning of things, the name of the grass beneath his feet, the food he eats, and finally, most destructively, how to interpret the expansive mass of black carbon before him. Reduced to an infantile state, he finally sleeps once more.
The boy wakes from his slumber confused, no memory of prior experience, or from whence he had come. He settles into a kind of routine, the other members caring for him with a pitiful curiosity despite their suffering, and he begins to explore the perimeter of the gray walls before him. Once, as he walks, the boy spots a lighter patch in the usually uniform wall. Upon closer inspection, the patch comes into focus as a matrix of small carved strokes, and upon even closer inspection, the boy becomes surprised by his ability to comprehend such a random assortment of symbols. He picks up a rock and begins to scratch in a reply…
The walls are covered and uncovered by the shadows of expression, clouds overhead passing through the light of the world, marked and erased by an eternally restless figure.
idk I kinda like abstract photography. im taking the piss here a little bit
For everyone outside the contemporary art world, in other words, those not subscribed to the dogmatic cult that believes in the reverence of found objects transubstantiated into the divine, those not contained in the basis spanned by deleuze and danto, (which, to the surprise of MFA’s everywhere, is most people), contemporary art is often unintelligible. We walk into the museum and we see great canvases covered in stuff and installations of more stuff, and we have emotions ranging from indifference to bemusement to the occasional huh thats kinda cool, laugh at the competitive bibliographies and lexicons of the labels, and go home, or just beeline to the permanent collection to look at the impressionists. People are generally aware of the game even if they dont know the specifics, the corrupt appraisals, the curator as canonizer, the gallery the alchemists round bottom flask, yada yada. For the longest time I was perplexed as to why art critics and aesthetic philosophers did not maintain their own artistic practice until I realized that they’re the ones with the craft- its a writers game, and if you don't know their language, forget it. The art itself is fish fossils, the artist the pure intentioned village idiot who digs up these permineralized chunks, it is only when taxonomically categorized by the scientist do the bones come alive, imbued with context, history. Those who actually draw or paint or sculpt or engage in some sort of artistic craft (which I guess am semantically separating from an artistic practice) feel, I imagine, quite similarly, although they might perhaps have a little more anger at the current state of affairs depending on how moralistic they are and if they depend on their craft for a living. I'm mostly ambivalent about it all. I like some contemporary art, and most of all I truly appreciate bullshitting for the love of the game.
All that said, there exists another, parallel community- contemporary Photographers, who seem to be affected by the inverse affliction, an amnesiac’s memory of their history and a pointless technical fixation. (Of course contemporary fine art photography exists, but it often feels subordinate to the 'major' mediums, segregated in specific wings, treated as the commercial cousin of fashion, or valued purely as an archive of things museum people find interesting (usually other artists). Contemporary photographers, as a population, seem to be rather obsessed with things that are, from the perspective of one who has spent ages attempting to develop skill in figurative painting, not that hard. I don't state this pejoratively, it is merely a state which results from the camera as a technology. “That democratic machine”, in the words of Susan Sontag. All of the technical elements of image making are iteratively made easier by ones own personal team of engineers, often to the logical extreme of dishonestly, the adjustment of the content of the image to some more perfect standard. Of course all of these adjustments are only additions to the ultimate fact that the photograph is produced all at once in a single exposure, a half second at most, in all but the most extreme of cases. Practically the entire population has access to perfect cameras, it feels obvious that the point of photography now should be to subvert and obfuscate. Additionally, the medium is unique in that there is always a boxer's chance. It is simply impossible for a figurative painter to 'accidentally' create a masterwork; one either has the knowledge or the practiced intuition. But in photography, the technical barrier is so low that the execution itself becomes a non-factor. Because the 'how' is negligible, the weight shifts entirely to the 'what' and the 'why’, especially over a series of images that demonstrates consistent intention. Go be more conceptual. Stop with the sunsets, or whatever.
Essay? written when I was 16, really angry and immature. You can tell i was taking euro at the time, id edit it but it is what it is.
Nothing exists in a vacuum, and certainly not me. My character is my own creation- the thoughts, words, and actions said and done to me interpreted in my own patent manner, and yet the subunits of those perceptions are borrowed, their complexities divisible into common, shared elements, inherited genetically, socially, culturally. My grandfathers were awful men, by all stretches of the imagination. Arrogant drunkards, all 3 of them criminals ( 2 in the legitimate sense of the word), the third a soldier, and entirely absent in the raising of their children. The worst was my mother’s father, of the hobbesian persuasion : nasty, brutish, and short. As such, she developed a hatred for the virile latino, Ulibarrí’s (1) horse. Quick to anger and quicker to strike, patriarchal, womanizing, the universal constants of the struggling man. And yet, she married its mirror, masqueraded as a different flavor. Absent are the beatings, the confinement, the overt disrespect, but in their place: verbal lashings, a refusal to help pawned off as ‘inability’, and a hidden mistress. The origins of my existence are not love. The label of love was given to the fetishization of a foreign woman and escapism, packaged by gauze, traumatic adhesive, and delivered with an unconscientious acceleration. Of course, can anyone blame my father? Can anyone blame me? When does the child, dominated by its progenitor, make the transition to an autonomous body? Does it ever? Parental determinism extrapolated out from an original sin, the devil's serpent, Quetzalcoatl’s blood (2). Yet we know it has agency, almost from the very beginning, it utters sentences never heard before, has natural conceptions of fear, or love, unlearned intuition. Or are those yet another form of inherited trait, evolutionary instinct.
I, naturally, attempt to distance myself from those who came before me. The pendulum’s swing, the Hegelian reaction, the third law pair. I lack the previously necessary adaptations of fiery passion, obstinate stubbornness, abrasives generated for the purpose of increasing friction, barely holding on. My disposition: agreeable, at times to the point of sheepishness. My appearance: softer. My romantic and sexual preferences on the periphery of the northern American zeitgeist, and certainly that of conservative-catholic-hispanics. Through the media I consume, I have attempted to find alternative role models for a more positive sort of masculinity, reading, watching and listening to all manner of different perspectives on what it means to be a man. In mere moments I encounter more varieties of opinion through the modern shifting kaleidoscope of information than my ancestors might have experienced in lifetimes. Hence the problem. Infinity equivalently comprehensible to 0 within the human psyche, indeterminate forms, the internet's firehose overexposing mental connections to null, to paralysis. What remains then, is the constant, generational influences. My relationships are consistently short flivers of sensationalism, antiquated biases are replaced with modern misconception. Youthful revolution exactly that, cyclical motion.
As I begin to grow into my body, to graduate from an androgynous, amorphous, state into a more clearly defined figure, the distrust remains, but directed at the self, insecurity, generationally sharpened to a point. Muscular definition derived from a late interest in athletics alien to skin and bone, the use of my anatomy upon another giving the sensation of self-violation. Introspection, like invasion.
These are the rivets of my armor, personal reasons, explanations and validations that construct my overdominant adaptations, useful only within the environment for which they were created. Your tone of silent anger, your tact, your political machinations of discontent were entirely alien forces. You are older than me, yes, but even if we were equal in age you would be still , wisdom a function of lived experience. Similar upbringings, but you have not hidden behind failure.
The genesis of our argument was inconsequential, but I augmented its impact to an extreme degree, expecting reciprocal retaliation, as if I was playing an adversarial game. You looked upon me, a bitch unwilling to engage in the “playful” melodrama of her pups, an older brother doing schoolwork. For all my attempted auto-interrogation, I have only attempted to externalize the blame, to translate it upon another medium, avoiding personal responsibility at all costs. Even this admission is yet another way to accomplish the above, selfish abuse to absolve a conscience. Such a ritual occurs periodically, the indulgent desire for reconciliation, a mind so egotistical that it believes acknowledgement of its own wrongdoing as ultimately effective, and the acknowledgement of the acknowledgement even more so.
(1) referencing El Caballo Mago, a short story by sabine ullibari in which the horse represents masculinity
(2) another creation story
What my dreams look like
Homogeneous uniformity
Like groundhog days or dead horses
Papal hymns, repeated verses
Isn't it funny?
Escapes wasted
“what has”
Not what could’ve or should've or would’ve or wouldn't have…
Why bother really, with all future locations?
Suppositions and Propositions and Dispositions
Bark-in’ general*
Obsession with advancement
Brittle little coverings
Can I not be left-
Bereft of prescience, of foresight
To my myopic deposition?
*bark in general (brittle little coverings), Barking general, as in officer shouting orders,( obsession with advancement(
A helpful technique for me to clarify the meaning of a word to myself is to consider its opposites. Lines- inverted
Contour and Value, antonyms disjointed by a linear absolutism, lest marks fade into others.
Discrete demarcations, marked or not. A zebra's photo negative the same figure shifted, absence defining presence, presence absence.
Queues dissolving into scattered points. emptiness the inverse of many? or the singular against the crowd? Depends on your attitude, the additive or multiplicative inverse
The playwright chooses the latter, naturally, always an attempt to scale their voice: not silence, a beat
Connections fray. Dropped calls, snapped clotheslines releasing their burden, garments tumble, mud-stained, free.
Clothing-lines canceled, clearance cubbies.
.Disorder, at the end of the line
peripheral patterns
Everything has an unstable foundation, a noisy floor. My ringing ears, the swirling patterns against my shuttered eyes (phosphenes, they call them), the gain of a microphone and the haze on a lens. Our subconscious automatically subtracts most of it from our perception, and we’re equally harsh when we tune our instruments. Low cuts, high cuts, slicing the pie into the narrow sectors of essential information, expected results. Consequently, always suppressing more than just the noise. How much do I ignore that I’d rather actually observe? a funny joke at the end of the table, a cry for help drowned by the whines and rumble of construction. What patterns are so consistent that I mistakenly brush them off? “Oh, don’t worry, they’ve always been like that.”
Idk, I feel like I miss a lot
performative aesthetics and gender radicalism (some woke shit). structural critique of identity, not a critique of identity itself.
uh ill define aesthetic in this context to be the elements of a group identity
The online commodification of aesthetic is so obvious that it is now a commodified aesthetic to critically analyze the commodification of aesthetic, but I guess im going to do it anyway. Everything is folded over itself, flattened, synechdochized and reexamined. It feels cheesy to say, but Marx's idea of "commodity fetish" has been turned inward at the self, we exalt the product- performance, where once we mystified the social relations embedded in objects, we now mystify our own subjectivity as a marketable asset for the purposes of social capital, constantly exploiting ourselves to maintain the production. This self-exploitation operates through what appears to be authentic self-presentation, masking the underlying labor of constant curation and emotional performance.
Exploitation of ones own attention, the self, is the most efficient way to extract labor from a population, as each subunit believes in believes in their own control. Why shouldn't they, they're making their own conscious choices. However, in order to project allegiance to a particular community, ones essence has to legibly project an understanding of the communities expectations. This illusion of agency is precisely what makes the system so effective: the harder people work to express their individuality, the more standardized and commodified their output becomes (and then because it has a target market you can run ads on it yay!). A less established outgroup can then reasonably critique their homogeneity, and the whole cycle begins anew.
Assisting the dominance of the internet, third spaces are dead or otherwise very profit focused. the internet is the only free alternative In the case of places like the gym, they've become vehicles to hone the performance instead of community spaces. In general, we've gone from experience to documentation, because this documentation is now profitable (either socially or economically) those providing the experience would like a larger piece of the pie.
A majority of these aesthetics are heavily gendered, which is no surprise. Usually the female aesthetics are more consumption based, the male aesthetics are more focused on some idea of self sacrifice, it goes both ways sure, there are male fashionistas and female body builders, but these social norms are ancient and expected. However, this gendered commodification of aesthetic reaches its most complex expression within transgender communities, where the fundamental stakes of aesthetic performance are amplified beyond social capital into questions of safety, recognition, and survival. The transgender experience is inherently aesthetically performative and incredibly laborious. Furthermore, due to the lack of significant real-world density in the transgender population, their communities exist largely online, precisely the spaces where aesthetic commodification is most intense.
The demands of passing (or successfully projecting the learned aesthetic of a particular gender) operate asymmetrically across gender lines, partly due to inherent biological factors: the effects of testosterone are far harder to reverse than to apply, but mostly due to the differing economic pressures that effect these communities. For transfeminine individuals, passing often requires learning to perform an exaggerated version of femininity- not because femininity itself is excessive, but because the online spaces where gender performance is learned prioritize visual legibility over the subtle social cues of embodied interaction. This hyperstylized femininity, learned from highly curated digital spaces, creates a feedback loop where trans women must navigate both the general commodification of aesthetic and a specific fetishization that views feminization as the ultimate taboo transgression. The widespread (often negative) implication of the transgender community into our political consciousness has, like all taboos, created an industry specifically focused on the fetishization of transfeminine individuals. Due to a variety of factors, a significant portion of the traffic the online transgender community receives has been overtaken by the consumption of fetish content which leaks into the broader culture. This contributes to a distorted aesthetic standard, creating a dynamic of internalized objectification where individuals may feel pressured to align with preexisting harmful narratives to survive online.
The transmasculine experience operates along different parameters. Rather than hypervisibility, transmasculine aesthetic performance centers on achieving invisibility, The aesthetic labor here is a subtractive medium: binders, packers, top sugery . Where transfeminine aesthetics involve amplification and addition, transmasculine aesthetics focus on strategic concealment, often leading to more generalized isolation.
Theres also nonbinary identity, which I guess inherently resists fixed categorization, but online spaces still often demand some sort of visual shorthand. In attempting to escape gendered performance, many nonbinary individuals find themselves funneled into a new kind of aesthetic, a curated androgyny that I dont really have to explain to you for you to get what I mean. This aesthetic is not universal or essential but it circulates widely because it's legible.
cutting your nails but the only media youve ever consumed is the intro to naked lunch (the book is about some guy doing heroin in north africa for 200 pages and being rlly dramatic and fragmented abt it)
click… click… click, keratinous metronome. fluorescents buzzing like blue wasps in a tiled vivarium. hands twitch, junkie castanets, tapping panic code on the swollen particleboard altar, wood pulp dressed up as faux-mahogany like a cadaver in sunday lace. nails grown feral, half-moons hoarding dirt, nicotine, strangers’ skin-cells, evidence bags of forgotten transactions. time for the liturgy. over the porcelain maw, white enamel gape that eats excrement, secrets, aborted dreams without prejudice, you brandish kindergarten safety shears, neutered blades. each snip a pin-prick lobotomy, shaved slices of identity clinging to the surface only to swirl down the drain with the gray water and yesterday’s alibi. click-click-click-click; echo ricochets down the ceramic corridor like cops firing beanbags in an empty metro tunnel, tiny suicides of surplus flesh. switch hands: the left is the other, alien, gloved in novocaine, like trying to autograph god’s eviction notice with your toes. ritual mirrors the fix: same spine-crook, same sweat halo, same monastic devotion to personal erasure. we tell the bureau of respectability we trim to stay civilized, filing down the neanderthal hooks that betray our species charade, but those crescent cuttings are geological cores, strata of grease, subway soot, courtroom dust, proof we still crawled out of some black lagoon licking slime off our knuckles. it isn’t civility; it’s logistics. the sensual machinations of flesh require smooth gear teeth, frictionless digits sliding across vulnerable geography in calculated interval, guitar strings flaying callus into song, wrestler’s palm locking, peeling, locking again. through reduction you invariably keep time.
to love is to be understood- fundamentslly labourious practice