THE BONK - fiction
“Then is nothing really fixed?” Ishmael asked on his labored jog up the hill, attempting in vain to find his second wind. “Is nothing s-”
“Well,” Hal replied through belied meditation, “It’s nothing but the times that make us of course.”
They were coming up on the hill that rose at a steady grade. The slope ahead wasn’t that bad, but the three of them had made this run enough to know what was around the bend. And the next one.
RAISON D'ÊTRE - fiction
From the view of winter, nighttime becomes the daytime of summer. At the year’s bookends, going outside demands the invitation of the sun, working its magic on the flagpoles and windowsills, extracting the deathly cold of night. The winter hangs static and tightly enshrouds the city from the sun with a pale gauze of soft sky. But it’s summer now, so everything’s deflating in the muggy New York eve. It means everyone is out late, harboring the afterglow of the sun’s vitality. Families prolonging their desultory walks, shadows lingering even longer at the gloaming, and everyone feeling daytime’s oppression unrobed before midnight’s fever.
THE SWAMP - fiction
The November sun casts a glare on the image of Gainesville, Florida that the two men watch from their newly found sofa. It’s an ugly thing this couch. A heavy odor of the outside but not quite a stench, permeates through the chintz, through their nostrils, something the two have admitted existed, referenced even through gesticulations and tacit gestures, but have yet to verbalize to the other. It has bulky cushions and far too many supporting pillows to be comfortable. So they’re left on the floor in one of the empty corners of the room, one of the men careful to disrupt the mass occasionally to keep cockroaches and spiders from nesting. Tonight would be another curfew night for the city and the two would have to choose what freedom was allowed wisely.
Shhhhhhhhh... - fiction
It was the promise of words that would have kept him from sleeping in till noon every day, assembling copious amounts of Top Ramen with the escape of an oddball flavor that, miraculously, would wind up in the Panamanian grocery store across the street. The finitude of words: vast but not endless, representing man in one corner, the universal systems in another. Unlike numbers, infinitely perfect but lacking the personality of the senses, memory; and sound, melodious yet dancing evanescently, beyond grasping, words seemed so damned human: resilient, playful, whole. The whole alphabet was a chummy cipher forming identities. Each word, if understood, appeared like a campaign yard sign on a bright, green lawn. Nothing but that lucid word stabbed into the earth. And you had to think, maybe words weren’t really against these systems though. Maybe, in truth, they were some nexus between sound and numeral, the key and the figure.