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.

When Will You Be Home?

It's, you know, pretty much the same. You haven't really missed much. They tore down that old house that was a part of the Underground Railroad, then moved the Foodland about fifty yards to the left onto the land where it was. They're putting in a day care at the high school, and your brother never leaves the basement, writing the first halves of a hundred good songs.

Why Was I Afraid?

Before she lied we always talked about going to Ireland to climb the cliffs by the ocean, so I decided to go on my own and nearly died when I slid on the rocks and fell to the beach. My mind slipped into the sea and for hours I laid under the indifferent sky settling onto the earth like a black and billowing tarp, a cold, soggy wind blowing sand to mingle with my blood. Before I passed out I remember thinking, that's it? I was amazed that this felt no worse than anything I had already dealt with, that the hardest of life comes only to the tired.

Homemade Nightmares

My optometrist says that if I don't start taking proper care of my glasses my vision will get worse faster. He says I should keep them in the case at night and clean them every day, but some things are better than being healthy, and I'm addicted to the way dirty glasses catch the light. Everywhere I go, cobwebs of passing ghosts swim to the sky and my heart seizes just before I realize.


Impossible terror, then a matchstick of hope.