FICTION
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
I know you shouldn’t keep wild animals as pets, but I’ve had the same spider in my bathroom sink for over two weeks.
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.
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 I was on earth I was a pretty good kid. I only got drunk when I needed to get drunk.
Mama sped along the highway, unbothered by bits of gravel that flew up from the front tires and struck the windshield of the sedan.
I loved Rena as much as a patient could love their gynecologist. We had tea together in her office. I cried when she asked how I was doing, and she showed me pictures of her terriers.
When Laika the space dog comes back, bulleted to earth in a tiny white escape pod that dissolves upon opening, nobody can believe it.
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.
He used to hold my hand on Commonwealth. I wonder sometimes if he ever still thinks about my mouth.
“The woman was a catastrophe,” Carlos told me at the time. “But she was as honest as my face is ugly.”
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.
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.
You’re joking, I say, interrupting the steady bumping of the doctor’s bushy white mustache.
A tortured simper uncoils itself across my mouth as I open another bottle of Penis wine.
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.
It was spring and the hills were irradient, like they had to get out all their green in one short burst before catching fire.
Share some abandon.
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