The old used plates run anywhere from fifty cents to a dollar and a half apiece and she is looking for something specific in the near ruin of the thrift store shelves. She has a box under her arm to gather what she finds as her fingers pick thru the china and plastic, lift and move the chipped and broken, browse thru the flowered and the sparkling. Here is a butterfly pattern, here is a rose; here is an abstract pattern, here art deco lines intertwine. She selects carefully; she knows that each…
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Added by cunningham on March 12, 2009 at 1:30pm —
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The light was strange, silver. He opened one eye and some of the brightness faded into vague familiarity, amorphous shapes he could almost recognize.
He dragged himself upright into a sitting position on the hotel bed. The mirror above the empty dresser was greasy, and his reflection bent and twisted as he shifted around, searching for some position where his bones didn't feel like they were being ground into splintered shards; his mind had holes in it, large gaps filled with the rushing sound…
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Added by cunningham on March 6, 2009 at 8:00pm —
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We’d become snarling creatures of our ineffective rage, our frustrated compassion. We turned on each other in our darkest moments of futility like horrible fanged animals spitting invective and vileness. It was no use. The walls dripped with our useless desire to help, to burst in all directions at once, to solve this problem and a thousand others just like it. We screamed at the sun.
We wanted to dig under the festering skin of this suburban nightmare and unearth the cancerous spot, tear it ou…
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Added by cunningham on March 6, 2009 at 4:35pm —
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“Well, if the doctor told me to stop or it might kill me, I’d like to think I’d pay attention; like, if I’d been hurting or something, and I went thru the trouble of going to the doctor, paying for it, feeling everything, all the bad, the cold table, the instruments, the worry, you know, all that shit, well, I’d think a person would pay attention.”
The air from the window unit blew ashes over the edge of the ashtray in weak little bursts; each puff slipped off the coffee table and down onto the…
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Added by cunningham on February 25, 2009 at 2:57am —
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I landed hard on the ground and spread my fingers out across the dirty asphalt, checking to see if they still worked; they did. I got back up and looked around. Nobody saw anything. I found a small spot of blood on my jeans.
The city yawned around me. I walked out of the alley onto the sidewalk and moved north thru the faceless afternoon.
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Added by cunningham on February 22, 2009 at 8:33pm —
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He used his lighter to pop the cap off a bottle of beer; then, he attended his cigarette. The air of the room was bad, the light dim, muddy, coming from a place he couldn’t name. He combed his fingers thru the thick tangle of his beard and thought about what happened. He rubbed his eyes for a moment, then let his fingers crawl away from his face and down onto the remote control; blue illumination chased the bruised light into shadow as a thin river of smoke trickled from his mouth across the top…
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Added by cunningham on February 21, 2009 at 1:53pm —
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Her eyes are magnets for darkness as she hands me my coffee. I take the cup from her; what's inside is cold and black, just the way I like it, and I watch ice cubes float across an impenetrable surface. I am sitting on the edge of a perfectly made bed at dawn.
“Are you ever going to do anything about this shit?”
The morning sun stares thru the window while dewdrops burn upon the grass outside.
I tilt my head back and drink.
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Added by cunningham on February 20, 2009 at 5:28am —
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He is kept on a short length of chain from a long gone swing set. He barks when someone walks by outside, a single bark followed by three short bursts and a weird yowl to finish.
The neighborhood is full of such, and at night he is joined by a chorus of lonely animals in yards overgrown with weeds, on rope and metal leashes, an orchestra of hundreds of barking dogs, quick shouts, the intermittent howl, the choked yelp, the machine gun rapidity and the steady beat of each individual voice convey…
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Added by cunningham on February 19, 2009 at 2:04am —
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The grandmother's face is wrinkled and dark, weathered and eroded, a low Appalachian mountain worn down to its foothills. Her head is covered by a purple stocking hat that glitters in the sun. She is missing her front teeth. She has gnarled fingers and bleached white fingertips from years of work. She works nights.
She is very tired after so many of them in an endless, endless row.
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Added by cunningham on February 19, 2009 at 1:56am —
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She checked the lock on the front door and came to bed. When she pulled the covers back, a cold draft flooded into the warm space. "Easy," I muttered. "It's freezing." She gave me the same look she always does, the same look I've seen for twenty years. I rolled over and pulled the blanket tight around my ears and she turned out the light and at some point, we finally fell asleep.
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Added by cunningham on February 18, 2009 at 12:52am —
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It's as though you can feel the raw dusty rope cutting into your neck in the final seconds before the chair is kicked out from under you and you swing. It is a painful and exhilarating sensation, a terror steeped in curiosity about what comes next.
The sun is shining but it matters little; you walk on the edges of many trembling wires, a symphony of balance, praying the wind remains calm. Your legs vibrate above the blade of a straight razor as gnats and wasps swarm around your face, the sound…
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Added by cunningham on February 18, 2009 at 12:42am —
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When he regained consciousness he was lying in an unnatural position on the hairy floor, his left leg twisted under him, his left arm pinned between his chest and the sink cabinet. His head rested against the base of the toilet like a drunk. From this strange position he saw mildew climbing the baseboards, cobwebs in the corner and a tiny crack running thru the floor tiles almost the length of the small bathroom. He knew his foundation was in bad shape; all the doorways were twisted, doors would…
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Added by cunningham on February 16, 2009 at 3:08pm —
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The locals at the gas station told us that if we followed them, they'd show us a good place to camp for the night. They were parked next to the convenience store in a battered truck with a dusty tarp covering a life on the road. We'd just arrived outside Phoenix after driving all day from Juarez where we'd eaten refried beans and diet pills for the speed with a fifty-year old hustler named Eduardo. We'd seen some things. The coming night sky wove a blanket of fool's gold and distant moonlight ov…
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Added by cunningham on February 16, 2009 at 3:04pm —
6 Comments
Twenty years to get here. Our dog slinks away while our voices stretch out and ripple thru the house, booming. Who knows how much the world finds out about their neighbors from brief snatches of half-heard arguments thru brick walls in unguarded moments of fleeting madness? We argue about the futility of love and its necessity for continuing endurance. We scream about the cold coming night and the pain of animals that cannot understand. We glare with the need to vent this growing hopelessness an…
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Added by cunningham on February 14, 2009 at 2:16pm —
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