FICTION
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
The most entertaining thing about Miguel is that when he was 13 he dislocated his shoulder playing basketball and can now pop it in and out of place. There is nothing particularly interesting about Miguel.
You’ve been dreading this day since the moment you found out you were pregnant—perhaps even before.
Before the headaches began, I thought myself sturdy: firm in my foundations, set square like a saltbox house.
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.
“The woman was a catastrophe,” Carlos told me at the time. “But she was as honest as my face is ugly.”
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 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…
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.
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.
I’m dancing with my best friend’s husband, under the influence of his jaws and thighs.
You’re joking, I say, interrupting the steady bumping of the doctor’s bushy white mustache.
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.
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.
The day does not conclude with the gentle exhale of the earth, but with Mother Superior flipping the hourglass over, again.
A tortured simper uncoils itself across my mouth as I open another bottle of Penis wine.
I pushed my nose to within an inch from the rug. I sniffed, and sniffed, and I smelled something…not quite right, but I couldn’t place it.
Share some abandon.
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