Muse

What was it I had said?  Did I breathe?  Was there air or ether in that faraway dreamplace?  Did I merely...  absorb?

"Foaming caldera..."

It licked at his memory.  A jailed promise from another age.  Perhaps he would know the key.

Muse

The hills seemed quiet now.  No more ringing laughter that poured down from their fires.  No more paper balloons launched by a thousand candles.  No dancing scent of smoked meat writhing through the evening air, warring with the coming night over which would name itself the more crisp.

She must have walked where her house once stood.  Rafters littered the ground, ground themselves to ash beneath their burden, scattered by inches in two sudden dimensions.

She must have walked where her house once stood.  Her footsteps had written her passage, the char the ink to her foot's quill.

Muse

"The egg is the most perfectly sized object for the human hand to throw."  It was the same thing he had said about a soda can the week before.  "It fits the palm perfectly; we were meant to do this."

His larynx felt the same way.

For All

  Was there ever consequence in the neuron?  The lie that binds, the greed of subreality, the voraciously tawdry dance of pains and lust.

  Perhaps the same could be said of all religions...

Last Week

Such paralysis. Such fear.

Woke up screaming.

The image was blurry, low-resolution. Fighting with all my will to keep myself from resolving it, from zooming in, from clarifying the image.

Because I know I will see that face staring back at me through the window.

Last Week

My parents decide to hold duplicate funerals for the grandparents that I never had or barely knew in her few comprehending moments.

I am late.

Is it the same amphitheatre it always has been? Perhaps smaller... I miss my grandfather as I always missed him, and I only catch the end of my grandmother's as I did in life.

Driving away in three minivans ago with Kitten, the inevitable and ubiquitous flat tire haunts.

Last Week

Another room inlaid with concrete and the distant fluorescent point-lights well illuminate the naked black woman lying on a steel gridwork suspended at some indeterminate height. Above, the shadow council looks on through diffused windows to... observe.

As I take turns becoming each in a series of relationships, I am always the one frozen atop the grid, numbly trying to escape the whirling arm fixed to the platform's center.

When I am myself, Kitten is frozen there, her face stapled to the interior of a book, her grim visage staring out at my nudity on the edge of survival. I slap her, I scream at her, I cry out "What is the way out!!!" She can only laugh, as the Joker laughs, when I have nothing I can offer, nothing I can threaten, and am powerless.

In a last effort, I twist and jerk to the side. Steel bolts puncture through the gridwork, impaling me at the forearms, the elbows, the wrists. It is quite the thing to feel both severed and crushed simultaneously.