FICTION
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
My new neighbor is making a violin from a cigar box. He got the cigar box from a guard. The guard, presumably, got it from outside the Fence.
When Laika the space dog comes back, bulleted to earth in a tiny white escape pod that dissolves upon opening, nobody can believe it.
You’re joking, I say, interrupting the steady bumping of the doctor’s bushy white mustache.
He used to hold my hand on Commonwealth. I wonder sometimes if he ever still thinks about my mouth.
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.
The day does not conclude with the gentle exhale of the earth, but with Mother Superior flipping the hourglass over, again.
You’ve been dreading this day since the moment you found out you were pregnant—perhaps even before.
When I was on earth I was a pretty good kid. I only got drunk when I needed to get drunk.
Directly after the arrival of the Armada, this model made sense, as the gap between Unthulanian and Human cultures prevented a commensurable exchange of practices…
And then he feels that familiar sensation of drifting—when his body untethers from the material world and he soon dissolves into a fine, floating mist that evaporates into the atmosphere.
Darkness always follows.
At the end of the meeting, the villagers agreed to contribute shillings and pounds to sponsor Elochi to a university in America.
I reached for my invoice, which Dr. George, holding it between thumb and forefinger as if it were a soiled diaper, dropped into my hand.
I’d never heard of anyone having a second baby right after the first one, but everything was so strange in those early days of motherhood that I just acted on instinct.
She turns her back for me to fasten the rows of metal hooks. Why isn’t our small, tender freedom enough?
I’m dancing with my best friend’s husband, under the influence of his jaws and thighs.
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.
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.
“The woman was a catastrophe,” Carlos told me at the time. “But she was as honest as my face is ugly.”
Share some abandon.
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