FICTION
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
Allanson looked out of the viewport, at the ragtag flotilla of ships trailing behind, some of them slow to catch up. It was to be expected with the little time that they’d had to cobble the fleet together.
You’re joking, I say, interrupting the steady bumping of the doctor’s bushy white mustache.
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.
I’m dancing with my best friend’s husband, under the influence of his jaws and thighs.
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.
He used to hold my hand on Commonwealth. I wonder sometimes if he ever still thinks about my mouth.
A tortured simper uncoils itself across my mouth as I open another bottle of Penis wine.
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.
When Laika the space dog comes back, bulleted to earth in a tiny white escape pod that dissolves upon opening, nobody can believe it.
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.
To be encased, Clint had always thought, was foolishness. Why allow yourself to be open to such sorrow?
A man with a fistful of showbags said, “That cow sounds like a person trying to sound like a cow.”
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.
At the end of the meeting, the villagers agreed to contribute shillings and pounds to sponsor Elochi to a university in America.
Before the headaches began, I thought myself sturdy: firm in my foundations, set square like a saltbox house.
The day does not conclude with the gentle exhale of the earth, but with Mother Superior flipping the hourglass over, again.
I don’t know why I was still talking about the rapture. I certainly didn’t believe in it. Regardless, it remained a thief…
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.
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…
Share some abandon.
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