FICTION
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
She turns her back for me to fasten the rows of metal hooks. Why isn’t our small, tender freedom enough?
Ever since your son brought you here, things have been different. He was crying when he dropped you off. You still don’t know why.
To be encased, Clint had always thought, was foolishness. Why allow yourself to be open to such sorrow?
When I was on earth I was a pretty good kid. I only got drunk when I needed to get drunk.
Sitting at the bar on Pacific Avenue. With the seashells in the walls. Same bartender from last year, still here, making the same lethal Mai Tais.
None speak of how the streets collide in coarse seams like scars, the fresh cobbles unable to level with the ones shaken from their mortar by uncountable seasons.
When Laika the space dog comes back, bulleted to earth in a tiny white escape pod that dissolves upon opening, nobody can believe it.
On the first day of our new life together, my husband realized that I was not interested in theoretical debate. He said it was okay by him and went out to get some pancake mix.
It all started with the curse of my tits. Women’s bodies are cursed. Everyone tries to look at them, everyone tries to ignore them.
Hitting up homes peopled by those with nothing much to lose was an easy score. The less you had, the less likely you were to defend it. But this home was different. Its residents had a lot to lose and the will to fight for it.
A man with a fistful of showbags said, “That cow sounds like a person trying to sound like a cow.”
Another image rises to us both: A man hunched before a TV, watching historical documentaries, correcting incorrect facts. Rasputin was not a priest, damn it.
I’m dancing with my best friend’s husband, under the influence of his jaws and thighs.
It was spring and the hills were irradient, like they had to get out all their green in one short burst before catching fire.
“The woman was a catastrophe,” Carlos told me at the time. “But she was as honest as my face is ugly.”
and on and on and on and on they ran, the Merry Men, running from a hundred and one arrows bought with taxes stolen twice over…
At the end of the meeting, the villagers agreed to contribute shillings and pounds to sponsor Elochi to a university in America.
Share some abandon.
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