Every Step is for the Last

I find it very sad that the ones who know the most about the world are dead. You and I, we wake up in the afternoon and find all of our things right where we left them, we assume that we're headed out into the same Earth as yesterday. The ones who are dead now went out to meet yesterday's world and found something completely different. Tires sliding on wet cement, a bird in the plane's engine, the Jehova's Witnesses on bicycles circling the blood bank with Molotov Cocktails.

Hibiscus Blooms

Lucifer sniggers heartily, crunching an apple on the floor of God's studio apartment, declaring, "I got the woman to eat from the tree, so what now?"

He doesn't have to say "i told you so," he just waits for God to damn them too.

A pencil slips from God's fingers, slapping against a filled up pad of paper, and in a shaking whisper he replies, "I'm going to let them create each other. They will make as I make, and you can twist them all you want, but they will unfurl so swiftly and with such force that your head will spin even as they are wrenched from the burning earth."

'Neer

Jaundice light loafs to the painted wooden extremities, waxing the fake hanging plants, glassing up our eyes. We tap the tabletops dotted with stray coffee, sunk in booths the color of cheap crayons, forest green, the waitresses in uniforms of the same. A soda fountain erupts on and off and plates ring against plates as hot bottles of syrup, dark and swirling koa, thud in front of red-faced drunks. Their cackling scratches the ceiling and crystallizes overhead. Our discourse encased in unsteady glee, a tomb of laughter. Don, the manager with the Icelandic wife asks us to lift our feet so that he may mop, and we all begin to yawn over the whiteness of a gloom-glazed morning paling the pavement outside. Bills are paid, a pack of matches taken, and lit one by one on the empty interstate home.

Maybe Pay More Attention

The other day, I saw a woman drop a baby. People gasped and crowded around her, she cried as she picked it up and stroked its head. I joined the throng, getting close enough to the woman to knock the blubbering infant out of her hands again.

"That's what you fucking get," I said.