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Researching Crematoria at Night

by Karen Stromberg No! This is a job for Day when sunlight denies everything and words-- ink, pixels-- are easily erased, it’s not for Night-- that undressed rehearsal, that lowering into darkness. See, Night says, it's easy-- first nothing, then the dreams.

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I didn't enjoy my lunch today

by Stephen O'Toole

I remember when exhaustion used to be good for me. Like once, when I was tired of being an orphan, and the Fagin wouldn't stop with all his ad-libbed oy-oy-oys, I ran out of rehearsals into a room full of drums, got down behind a gong and started sobbing. The man, a Mr Burke, who taught us typing, came in to assure me breezily that I'd broken both my legs. In his hands, he made his script a megaphone, just barely kept himself from calling Cut. Typing, even the eyes-ahead and muscle memory sort that he instilled in us, had never made him feel worthwhile the way The Theatre had. There is neither life nor love in a standard letter and let's face it: it’s not like nine to five you’ll take dictation for some Cyrano. Most likely, it'll only be a telecoms circular or a note about disruptions to the water supply—and this is what the those that can do have to hope for, so, you know, ouch.

He was in no position to negotiate, is what I'm saying. Without an even number of orphans, his world would have no meaning. In the morning, he'd be back to merging cells in Excel, for a class of half a dozen half-asleep fourteen year olds, on whom the heavy irony of 'cells' would not be lost, but also, you know, not fully understood. At least—dramatic pause—not yet (cue screeching Psycho strings, etc.) And it wasn't as though he could just draw soot onto some other girl's face. There were steps that he'd been drilling in me three times a week, and if it turned out that he could pass those on to someone new in two afternoons then, well, we'd all have something to feel embarrassed about.

So even if I wasn't quite scheming as I sat there, with my knees pulled up against my chest and wet with tears, I was, at least, aware of this perfect storm of sadness growing between us, feeding off his misery and mine, and I thought that if I stayed still and waited, I could make myself like one of those barns you see that’s sucked, intact, up into a hurricane, and rides it, fucking surfs it, round and round with the cows and the trees and the men in their motorcycle sidecars, before just drifting down again smoothly, not back where it had started though, but somewhere more useful—like, beside a little river or else a gold mine.

I heard the megaphone crumple. He said, We’ve all been working very hard, and you, especially, well I know it can't have been easy—what with all those different balls you're juggling, and he paused, he choked, aware, I guess, that opening up discussion to which specific balls I had airborne was one he didn't need or want to have. He backed towards the door and used the megaphone to speak. Young lady, he said, I mean it now, and this is the voice of God speaking: I want you out of my sight and home resting.

Years later, I’m lying to a date. I’ve told him that I've never had a truly perfect day. At least—dramatic pause—not yet (cue screeching Psycho strings, etc.) But the truth that I’m ashamed to say is that my only perfect day was the one after I’d earned a reprieve from orphanhood. My days now are half an attempt at forgetting yesterday’s stresses and half an attempt at steeling myself for tomorrow’s. But that day was nothing, just a blank—and not an anxious one. All I was alert to was a sense of convalescence, of being better. A white sheet feeling with a clean laundry smell. But I bet my date would roll his eyes if I told him this. He’d think that I was being too Plath-y. And so what? Is it any less shameful to say I spent the day in bed, eating bags of Quavers and watching Sister Sister repeats? Because if I really thought about it, that’s probably what I did.

The moral of all conversations is this—between the sudden choice of two clichés, choose neither. Say that it's been good to see you, go home, and sleep alone.

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Cirrus

by Chris Holdaway

Waking to standing waves & clouds heaped

In Latin.  The mechanical course of Summer singing over time.  We live

On the harmonics of schooling fish & finely timed tremors

Under heaven of scales.  No one can decide

If the ocean of intercession is greenness or grey; military

Dancing complexes, to drums produced to sound

Like small planets— and the loneliness encysts.

Real by missing, taller than the freezing point

Of air, so large it would seem impossible to ever be sharp.  Today

Squeeze the moon into a blue bathing suit to see

How long before it pops like a cork.  A grain of

Sand in the winds of orbit passes

Through a body never noticing. . . .particle

Scattered like surprised deer

That thinking like people from armchairs

Catch on themselves in a tapestry scene—where the sky is woven

Black and snow lines the mountains in red.  False sun

Dogs shadow neighbours with little difference

Between

The dead chick & fallen fruit beneath the tree . . . It invites

Comparing buckled footpaths and then sewn fields coming apart—

Echoes of weakness when sound has no time

To care

Who hears its leaking into the eversphere.     There is no simpler way

To feel alien than by walking

Wrong carwheel side of feet dragged under pockets.

There are copycat children laundering in cemeteries

And there’s no telling what’s more morbid:

—the romance or coke.     I have grown

Invented; cut like a finger.  I’ve watched grey matter build

The pyramids on crowns of my friends, and just once my nose

Bleeds from heaving at a freshcracked can too intently.

My bloodstream turned out

Through nostrils, like a map laid out in its entirety.  Air in

The warmth that would have been lethal

On its own —and on top of all this

Death is only death.

                               It’s news, that sages are only found

In danger zones, where they are tortured on the shores

Of 40-watt suns.  Their bruisemould becomes a tapeskin

Record, describing scents as flavours; elder wine & lotus

Flower port.  The tiny

Cracks in behaviour; the tiny spirals in belief;

Tiny curves of artwork.     Energy conserves

Energy—so well, she dies and we feel

Bulldozed into clearing the mood with

A wall across her ears and prison of the room next.

Otherside of the same aggregate of light she is filling in

Mortar between bricks, exhaustively flush, experiencing each

Transformation of anything.  Things happen fast—shadow

Play flowing as she’s thrown from a cliff over

The meathooks of vertical crawling trees that take her

Ribs in their crooks until . . .

My love you are soft and dust like an apple

I regret picking up; cold lock of hair dried up the other side

Of rot.  Where trespassers forget

The point of their tongue,—can’t place it

Behind gated teeth or on flesh ridge.  The sense of every moment

Emptying forever; when the common sleep of this world could not stop

You living forever.

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Roommate

by Richard Wehrenberg

I say a main difference between us is your belief in god

You have mentioned 3 or 4 times to your friends that i was raised atheist

You show me memes from the internet using your tablet

You say your mom after i say something 

You help me clean up my dog’s vomit 

I say how was your day and mean it

You say something about a rehearsal going well

I say good and sweet

You wake me up because you missed the bus and need a ride

The whole ride i feel the car could fly into the air at any moment

Which of course feels really sweet

I am basically asleep

I want to feel basically asleep most of the time is a thought i have during that car ride

I am driving you to school

You are an opera singer

I feel like your dad briefly 

You ask me to go to the opera with you this saturday night

I say i wait tables on saturday nights 

You say well shit

We both don’t flush our pee which is a punk house custom

I am peeing on top of your pee

For some reason that makes me feel close to you

You say please be careful every time i leave the house

You say young lady when seriously addressing your dog

You call my dog biggun because he is a large dog

Each time you say it i picture my dog as an oversized gun

Which of course feels really sweet

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The North

by Thom Robinson

When he moved down to London, he told people about the North. “The thing about the North...,” he said. He talked about the nightclub that he went to as a teenager. He hinted that his town had a history of football violence. When Thatcher died, he said that it was good. His sister moved to Manchester to do a fashion course. “I’ve been thinking that I could live in the North again,” he said. “So much cheaper too.” He paid a thousand pounds a month for a one room flat. “Yeah, Billy Liar’s an amazing film,” he said. He talked to Southerners about Factory Records as he did another line. “If you like those bands, you should listen to The Chameleons,” he said. “So Northern. You can hear the sound of rain.” He thought about his childhood and afternoons out in provincial market towns. He thought about being a teenager and hanging around the Spar. Now he stayed inside in his Dalston flat. “What do you call it?” he said. “A breadcake or a bun?” He’d sing half-remembered chants from the homeground when drunk. “Let’s go to London Fields for a kickabout,” he said. He had a role as an extra in This Is England ’88. He texted his mum when a song by his band was used in the background of an advert for E4. He Instagrammed a picture where he had his arm round Johnny Marr. He Instagrammed a picture of John Cooper Clarke. He Instagrammed a picture of his mate with Mark E. Smith’s mum. “I’d love to go back,” he said. “So much cheaper too.” He went back for Christmas and he Instagrammed pictures of boarded-up shops. “The thing about the North,” he said, on New Year’s Eve, as he lay in bed in a French girl’s flat that was paid for by her dad. “The thing about the North is this.”

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Work Poems

by Richard Wehrenberg

Work Poem 1 At work currently selling vegan baked goods to ppl drinking coffee and very berry juice emailing you There is a young punk looking person who is surreptitiously / what i perceived as abashedly reading foucault i think like hunched over discipline and punish like doesn't want ppl to know for some reason Right next to him is an extremely wide eyed person speaking w/ what seems like intensity and passion to another person whose face i can't see Another person in the room is my friend gary, who also works here but is just a customer right now who comes up to talk to me occasionally he is british i like him a lot he just read me a nonfiction thing he is working on about learning to make pasties / growing up in a small town in England One other person in the room is this lady who once was pissed when we didn't have 'her' cookies in stock one day like she said 'aw no I'm gonna be really sad, you don't have MY cookies' and i fended off annoyance in my brain w/ what seemed like a cavalry of anti-annoyance horses, am good / have full access to that cavalry at any/all times mostly i feel It is my roommates birthday / I couldn't get off work so i won't be able to come to columbus today/tmrw Sometimes i realized i don't think of a moment as real and then i like forget it or am remembering just what I am doing in my brain like the moment (ie the ppl/objects around me) doesn't exist just my brain activity maybe or something else I am not conscious of is being carried forthwith w/o consulting me Rlly like the title 'humiliate cops' for a poem and those poems in general think i have a 'soft spot' for poems that are written w/o much editing feel like poems are always supposed to be at least societally/institutionally 'polished' and all that (for good reason most of the time) but i like these literally feels like u wrote them at work which you did lol Miss you

Work Poem 2 farted on accident while standing up on the bus today since i am tall my butt is like really close to the sitting down people's faces so i low key farted on this person's face it made me feel really bad like partially for farting on her face and partially because like i couldn't control myself felt like i had no choice but to fart on her face felt very sad for brief periods of time over the past few days usually will last anywhere from 10 min - 3 hours think because i feel angry @ things & then feel confused by what to do confused by what to do & then not doing anything it will be a small thing like this morning i pressed snooze on my alarm a lot and then had to rush to get to the bus stop & felt angry w myself for pressing snooze or like, have been planning a goners tour for may & then all day at work kept imagining tour & imagining myself being a 'touring musician' & that seemed really frustrating to me but angry is only part of it there are like 1000 parts probably seems like you are really good at handling things & multi tasking how DO U DO IT feel interested in reading you elaborate on this 'Volunteering at bookstore currently, feel bipolar ie having very depressing thoughts then within close if not immediate proximity very exciting thoughts, cant seem to stay in one mental state, feels insane, bipolarity runs in my family and i think it occurs in me in spurts / fits like this'

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Hello Zürich

by David Rule

Jenny, I really admire your superb new crank body. It's so open textured. I like its course grain, excellent plasticity and warp resistance.

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A year ago I was sure I wouldn't be a lion, but yesterday I told Jack I was a lion and crawled around and he climbed on my back and seemed to believe me.

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There was a moment yesterday, on the train, where everyone showed me pieces of pencil lead stuck beneath their skin, like: you don't have pieces of pencil lead stuck beneath your skin? Ruben had his in his stomach. I think the boy next to be was asleep. His mother had cheese rolls and plain white pasta in boxes and his sister waited until the last minute to ask for the bathroom.

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Roaring Eldorado

by Sharnayla Page

spread eagle, face down on the highway

a grey suicidal fella, the tail that dragged for miles

murder flew over and a black feather floats down beside him

Roaring Eldorado eases off the gas and changes lanes.

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I Named Her Naturally Because I Love Castles

by Dan Hogan

I still don’t think there is anything like the sound of windchimes stirred by dad’s head. He’d be in the kitchen, where the windchimes were hanging, I mean are still hanging, you know what I mean, they’re still there even now, mum’d found all types with bent spoons, shiny metal cylinders, ceramic fish and these miniature teapots I swear only Snugglepot or Cuddlepie could use if they wanted tea, she loved that stuff when she was alive and I reckon she probably loves it wherever’s she’s gone, and he’d be knocking around in the cutlery drawer looking for a bottle opener at five ay em or whatever ‘cause the bloke can’t sleep for all the alcohol he needs so he’s always drinking. When I was fifteen or sixteen or wait I think I was actually twenty one because I remember asking him to leave some dosh for a bit of petty if he had any. I walked into the kitchen for some water and the bloke’s in there out cold on the lino with the mongrel snuggled up beside him. Castle was our dog then and I reckon Castle is a pretty good name for a blue cattle. I named her naturally because I love castles. And really that’s something there’s not enough of in Australia. Castles hey. I mean I don’t really know any except for the fella who tried to build one for his missus over in Budge because he loved her heaps and that. She died doing child birth and so did their daughter. Heaps sad hey. He stopped building the castle and went out on the lake in his dinghy one night. They reckon hypothermia got him but I don’t reckon it was the freezing cold. What’s made of the castle is still there but. We used to always be down there as kids having rock wars. I thought I was being smart once and wore goggles, bloody hell man, copped a fair rock to the right goggle and my eye actually went instantly black. But it was all good fun then because I was heaps into castles. I still really dig them but there’s just none around. If this government built more castles and that there would be more tourism. They could actually make so much money. The money’s in the moat, as they say. You only have to look at England to see how castles make heaps of dosh. Castle was a beautiful mongrel. True blue through and through as they say. I don’t get what true blue really means but she was blue cattle plus she loved dad heaps and I reckon he let her sleep inside when nobody was home. I was working in this big dumb warehouse place one day, dumbest job it was, you know where Chittaway is, out there near the roundabout, dad walks in one day with Castle on a lead. It was the weirdest thing hey, he never walked that dog or came to my work or like even parent teacher interviews or anything. The bloke walks straight up to me and goes “Castle’s come to say Hello,” we both stood there for ages not even saying a single word, Castle was loving it, wagging her tail and tongue hanging out and all that. Next thing the bloke pipe’s up with “Castle’s got cancer.” I never heard of a dog getting cancer before hey. Things were way different after Castle was gone. At least five times a day dad would say “It’s just you, me and the dead dog.” The bloke would be talking to me but sometimes he’d say it under his breath when flicking through the TV guide. That’s about the time dad started spending all his time in the back shed. Little thing it was with no electricity. The bloke was really down. For a while it felt like I was living on me own. Dad’d started saying “As good as a dead dog in Spring” whenever something was a bit shit. Like when he’d bash his head on the windchimes in the kitchen or burn his toast or realise there was no milk in the morning he’d go “Good as a dead dog in Spring” and then do like a sigh and a grunt. I think it was Spring the following year actually, dad comes inside from the back shed one afternoon with this deadset shit-eating grin on his face and goes straight for the fridge. Besides the dumb look on the bloke’s face I didn’t really pay much attention to him and figured he was going in for a fresh tinnie.

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Ducks

by Victoria Manifold

This wig is itching my head. I reach under and scratch, trying not to disturb the hair too much.

  This bloody thing. This bloody awful itchy thing. Got to keep it on though or else they’ll recognise me. The ducks. Those fucking bastard ducks.

  You really don’t know what it’s like do you?

  People say to me, Andrew they say, you’re not interesting enough to be watched. You are the watcher, spying on people and peeking through windows. But then I say if that’s true then why are they always there. I mean maybe you can’t see them, I don’t even see them most of the time. But. They. Are. Always. There.

  I’ve tried all the ways. Everything I can do to get rid of them, lose them, shake them off. But still when I turn the corner there they are. So you want to know my secrets? A bunch of duck brains filled with my secrets. My secrets passing as electricity through their nerves and synapses. MY secrets. Ugly little grey cells clumped together in their tiny heads. The sinew of their optic nerves connected to those soulless staring eyes that look straight at me.

  I could hold those brains and crush them in one hand. If it were down to me I would murder every sack of shit duck in the world. I would never get close enough though. I feel I know what their eyes taste like and I can imagine the smooth shiny balls of sight sliding on my tongue.

  They want to know everything about me and they find out by watching.

  The wig is helping. Less of them seem to recognise me now. But still I feel their eyes on me.

  I feel their eyes on me when I’m in the shower or when I’m using the toilet. I haven’t been able to shit or wash my dick properly for weeks. I go to the supermarket every day and every day they look at me there.

  I try to think of other things but their looks always interrupt any thoughts I have and then all there is to do is seek out John-Paul.

  Oh god, John-Paul is a handsome young man. I try not to look at him though because then the ducks will see me looking and then what? Then what?

  But what I really want to know is why? Why can I smell their feathers and hear their upper beaks snapping against their lower beaks? It just makes me so fucking SICK.

  God, Jesus Christ, if they catch me looking at John-Paul what will they do? I only come in this shitty little shop to see him anyway. He’s stacking the shelves and his hair is shining beautifully. And, oh boy, John-Paul, I can see your penis bulging in those tight jeans. How can you tease me like this John-Paul? I want you so badly. My dick is actually aching like a sprained limb. It’s got a throb and heartbeat of its own now John-Paul. I’ve got to get this under control. If the ducks feel the drumming of my dick beat there will be trouble.

  If he would love me then maybe they would stop. I saw him kissing a girl once. I watched them through a gap in the stacks of tinned food. I knew his mouth tasted of cigarettes and peppermint chewing gum.

  If I think about it hard enough I can taste his mouth in my own mouth. I can feel his tongue, hot quick lump of flesh, punching against the insides of my cheeks. Saliva fills mouth. I lick my lips in anticipation and then I hear it, it’s faint but it's definite. A soft quack.

YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!

  They've ruined it. I can't imagine kissing him now. All I can picture now are the ducks in a line. The ducks and their eyes. Their shiny black eyes.

  That fat slob is on the checkout. Her skin looks like uncooked dough. Why’s she sniffing her fingers? Has she been masturbating? Urgh, she makes me feel hot vomit bubbling in my stomach. Why don’t they make her do the stacking and put John-Paul here? Then maybe I could touch his hand when I handed over the money for this soup.

  I eat some fish in the supermarket café and it leaves a metallic taste in my mouth. I hang about next to the frozen peas and I put my cold hands into my cold pockets. All the time they watch me and I can’t take my eyes off John-Paul.

  So I’m watching John-Paul but the ducks are watching me. Always watching me.

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and they watched and they watched

by Hannah Jacobs

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Visit Original Link

Sea Song

by The White Russian

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Larkin

by Thom Robinson

I walk through Pearson Park to look at Philip Larkin’s flat before driving to Cottingham to look at Philip Larkin’s grave. There are families in the park with children by the pond and strict tall trees and people walking dogs. I forgot to note the number of the house where Larkin lived so I walk around the park and wonder if I can guess. Then, round the side of an outbuilding covered by trees, I find a Philip Larkin plaque. The plaque’s obscured by spray paint that mostly consists of Zs, but I can still read the words “number 32.” I walk in the direction of number 32 and pass a blue bench with a gold plaque that says “In memory of Philip Larkin, Hull poet, 1922-1985”. The bench is covered in graffiti and says “Ashim Fenman is a mommy boy” alongside other scrawlings of Asian names. “Serves you right for being racist,” I say, to Philip Larkin, in my head. I stand opposite number 32, looking at Larkin’s attic window and taking pictures when no-one’s looking. I vaguely imagine Larkin sitting in his flat and all of his years of prolonged spinsterhood. The wanking and the gin and the depressing parts as well. I imagine Philip Larkin trying to occupy his weekends, without even his own grave to visit for entertainment, and I imagine him bicycling to Beverley instead.

I drive to Philip Larkin’s grave and, though it’s a nice day, no-one else is there and there are no flowers either but there’s a plastic plantpot with some dead strands inside and I pick up the plantpot and peel off the £1.00 label that’s stuck onto the side and I screw up the label and put it in my pocket as though removing the priceflap on a hardback bought as a gift. I stand there for a while and wonder what to do. Then I see there are some stones at the foot of the gravestone so I walk into a bush and look for a stone to put onto Philip Larkin’s grave and I pick up a stone and examine the stone then put down the stone because it’s not a nice stone and I reach down again to find a better stone and in the midst of this think “I am fucking ridiculous”, then I walk back to the grave and put down the nicer stone. I see that a gravestone in front of Philip Larkin’s has a mawkish poem written on the back that ends with the lines “Too beautiful to live, Too young to die”. I imagine Philip Larkin facing these underwhelming words and having to read them endlessly for all of eternity. “Serves you right for being miserable”, I say, only I don’t know who I’m talking to this time.

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hug laurie huge truck octopus house

by Dan Hogan

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Desert Hot Springs, CA

by George Djuric

In the old days, rightfully erased from his memory – when a genial Aleister Crowley filled the world with wholesome joy and the kindly tales of the forgotten Marquis de Sade kept our firesides merry and pure, when it used to be wrongfully thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood – a man walks down Palm Drive in Desert Hot Springs, California; in the present time of ours, since no memory stands available. Downhill, of course, due to the natural configuration of the terrain, from Hacienda Heights – an ironic name with multiple hues – toward Two Bunch Palms. Generally, a man who is misunderstood has always this advantage over his enemies: they do not know his weak point or his plan of campaign. But not here, not along this stretch of sidewalk where sandy time is near melting at 117 degrees Fahrenheit, putting to shame Meursault’s Algerian humidity. As he walks past Livreri’s used cars shack, beneath the veil of brine and tears his eyes are blinded; he is conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on his skull. A shaft of light shoots upward from a crimson red ‘77 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Brougham’s chrome grill and I feel as if a long, thin blade transfixes his forehead. At the same moment, all the sweat that had accumulated in his eyebrows splashes down on his eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture.  In his case truth must, out of necessity, be stranger than Meursault’s  fiction; for they have made fiction to suit themselves, Camus included. For they are weak.

For the lack of lovely flora – as he is pounding in his blazing head the rhythm of Dylan’s song mentioned above, the rhythm defining his current state of mind, if any left – his eyes, still under the warm film of moisture, inspect the human fauna coming his way and passing by; including but not limited to loud dialogues unmistakably aimed at the vicinal audience rather than the person spoken to, the fine rattle of a few ankle bracelets – that in all objectivity don’t rattle at all – and the numerous disturbed stares whose owners left the building long time ago. Everyone who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his blazing mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

He simply worships this seemingly derelict town at the edge of the Western civilization; infatuation initially forced upon him by the absence of green manalishi copius enough to withstand the suburban lifestyle of West Hills, CA, nestled at the very western edge of the San Fernando Valley; proving once again that going West has many colorful connotations. Like the sun at Desert Hot Springs midday, adversity explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. It keeps him sane: a man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into the story, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Until he reaches the Sunlite bus station and the silence empties the street for a brief of passing by.

Once he remembers walking with his publisher through the Downtown Belgrade, now Serbia,  who made a remark which he had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet he had heard it once too often, and he saw that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, ‘That man will get on; he believes in himself.’ And he remembers that as he lifted his head to listen, his eye caught an omnibus on which it was written No Vacancies. ‘Dane,’ he said to him, ‘Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I heard their flames about certainty and success. I heard it all. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums. My friend Bora Čorba is held on the third floor of the Vojno-Medicinska Akademija. Like them, I tried to be some ten minutes ahead of the truth. And I found out I was eighteen hundred years behind it. And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine. I did try to find a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was someone’s stale orthodoxy. We aren’t talking the cookbook here, Dane, where quick recipes help the former housewife instill some self-respect and get off the ‘mother’s little helpers.’ After all, if you insist on believing in yourself, go for it, be my guest, just make sure first that you know who your self is.’

As he passes by the Carniceria, recently renamed into Rancho Dominguez Market, the Hispanic rhythm blasts through the ether. The parked vehicles, herding tight next to each other, drop in value proportionally to the increasing decibels, while customers seem lively and jovial, kids galore. His ’99 Ford Taurus, absent here this time, rests at home with a broken fuel pump, pushing him down this stretch for the best of reasons an incontinence can provide: there are occurrences that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with his Lilly of the West step regardless of distraction neighboring rhythms could induce, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers. The smell of ripe watermelon bursting in the field fills yet another dimension of this space, a symbolic unity formed by the languor of the fluids, by the darkening of the animal spirits and the shadowy twilight they spread over the images of the unthought-of; by the viscosity of the blood that laboriously trickles through the boiling vessels, by the thickening of vapors that have become blackish, deleterious, and acrid, by visceral functions that have become slow, lazy and somehow slimy – this unity, rather a product of sensibility than of thought or theory, gives melancholia its characteristic stamp licked by predestination. There is the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness is reassuring, because it alone is way too familiar.

Walking in the direction of the Von’s Supermarket, he has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him, just like this length in between the Swiss Village and the downtown Desert Hot Springs and the malodor of its evaporating thermal waters. It is the parallax view incapable of measuring both the distance of a single root and that Slavic resignation so dear to Conrad’s heart of darkness. Here in the Coachella Valley the back of his language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. This, at first, was indescribable. He projects the lines and colors that affected his inner eye. He conceptualizes from his missing memory without adding anything, without the details that he no longer sees in front of him. As the last resort of godknowswhat he paints the impressions of his childhood in the dull colors of a forgotten day. But the emotion it came out of is something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for the absent. It is so clear to him that he can’t walk out among people without feeling ashamed, as if he is in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of them saw it. It is an immoral conscience because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every step.

The corner of Ironwood Drive and Palm comes across as desert and bare, a tube of vacuum, a sacred patch of land devoted to meditation. It feels as if Chronos encountered an interregnum,  or simply went gambling to Agua Caliente Resort and Spa in Rancho Mirage. Time in Desert Hot Springs tends to evanesce along with the underground thermal vapors, yet this is different. He lets one green turn red, unable to move, touched by somebody else’s disease en passant. Unless we are all mad, he argues, there is at the back of the most maniacal thought a story: and if we are all mad, there is no such thing as madness. If I set myself on fire, it is quite true it may illuminate other people’s weaknesses as well as my own.

As he walks by the side of the building toward a tobacco shop owned and operated by two Pakistanis, Doug is sitting on the sidewalk leaned on the wall. He doesn’t know his name, the guy is the spit and image of CCR’s Doug Clifford, and he extends his hand with a five-dollar bill.

Doug is touched. ‘Generous of you, man, thanks a bunch. What’s your name anyway?’

‘Names come and go, man, today I feel like Cortes in doubt.’ Taking a look back, those wooden ships on the water, free and easy, emerge more solid than soil itself.

There are no names here, no words. The desert cleanses everything in its wind, wipes everything away. The both men have the freedom of the open spaces in their eyes, their skin is like metal. Sunlight blazes everywhere. The ochre, yellow, gray, white sand, the fine sand shifts, showing the direction of the wind. The men know perfectly well that Desert Hot Springs wants nothing to do with them.

  Immediately when you arrive in DHS, for the first or the fifth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside; and within, even in busy places like this, there is a hushed quality in the air, where the quiet is a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightaway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really goes dark.

You leave the Swiss Village gated community, pass the Mission Lakes Country Club, go down the Clubhouse Boulevard, out into the sandy plain and stand awhile alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the gates, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives here has undergone and which the French call le bapteme de solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like the Fourth of July flares, even memory disappears  – a strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in Desert Hot Springs for a while is quite the same as when he came.

Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can’t help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, even walk back, whatever the cost in time or money or health, for the absolute has no price.

  The inside of the supermarket is some forty degrees below the exterior, and ironically, sweat begins to pour now. On top of the bare essentials comes a Foster’s Lager 25 ounce can, perfectly illegal for street consumption in California. Whenever you spot a shady looking person carrying one of those brown-sugar brown paper bags, you don’t need a Rolex to tell the time. California is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in fancy clothes, perpetually disputed by poets in rags. Realizing that any further delay just postpones the inevitable sentence, he pays, buys a Mega Lotto ticket, and hits the heat head on.

Well aware that freedom of the press – as any other freedom – is guaranteed only to those who own one, as did DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, he takes the virgin sip while rotating around the light post, proving once more that the quality of our expectations determines the quality of action to follow. Rectitude, in this petty case of California law, like a jackal, feeds among the innocent. Anyone who has ever travelled on foot up or down the sidewalks of Desert Hot Springs is extremely lucky when presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point he’s merrily in business; with cops around or not, those billies of the vest.

No one in his right mind will ever bicker the soothing qualities of a cold beer. Australian for beer, Serbian for drinking binge, six-pack for football, on this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hangs as on a faintly trembling axis of the last cry for freedom, before the very use of the word becomes regulated and the Fourth of July turns flares free.

Fighting the incline and drinking regulations, he became conscious of a presence in the air, something which has been there all the time but which he has never isolated and identified – the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation. Yet, it requires a certain amount of internal force to break down, since nothing snaps in a gummy environment. Where there is power, there is resistance. A complete self-humiliation requires enormous strength, more strength than most of us possess. He sensed an infinite scream passing through nature around him and took another gulp. Then his gentile dybbuk starts spilling through the Foster’s haze, ‘You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you; you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: Who dares to ration our relief? We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.’

  This O’Reilly parts clerk stares at him indifferently, ‘You should buy the warranty, if something goes wrong you can’t return the pump without it.’

Bullshit. ‘Maybe I should buy the warranty only and skip the pump. What do you think?’

Another blank stare. Another stage is bare, deserted by human spirit. Two counters down, a young, short Hispanic dressed in blue silky baggy pants resembling pajamas and a white sweat shirt turns head his way, ‘It’s good to be out, yeah!?’

‘Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.’ He smiles inside; it still feels refreshing to be recognized as a tough guy, regardless of the fact that he has never served time. However, he spent some years around those who did. Repudiating the virtues of the mainstream, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it. Their ambient, thick with permanent tension and charged with rolling hills of mixed emotions, is a true artistic fertilizer, yet very few broke the circle and moved toward the mainstream by pushing their aptitude further. A certain curse hangs low above their insecurities, the fear of foreign, unpossessed places; the fact that you first have to abandon your cave before you could conquer what lies in wait for you. They are not afraid of stepping out, not afraid of facing the unknown: their bone marrow stands frozen in front of the interim. An old pal from his abandoned country, Gaston the Gypsy, tried to explain it once, and it came out crooked. ‘You see that shack? That’s where I was born. You know, one day, when I was a little boy, my mother she took me on her knee and she said: ‘Gaston, my son. The world is a beautiful place. You must go into it, and love everyone, not hate people. You must try and make everyone happy, and bring peace and contentment everywhere you go.’ And so... I became a waiter. Well... it’s not much of a philosophy, I know… but... well... fuck you and fuck the waiters... I can live my own life in my own way if I want to. Fuck off! Don’t come following me to my shack!’

Still laughing in the face of 117 degrees, he marches up the steep incline coming his way once past Pierson. Laughter always has been his most intimate companion, if this boring sentence does it any justice. And the word itself is ridiculous: just-ice! The freakin’ beer got me, he meditates, by the nostrils of my balls. Dear God and Monty Python help me reach Mission Lakes Boulevard and its flats, present me with a break after all, before I even think of how to replace this bloody fuel pump comfortably resting at the bottom of the Taurus’s large fuel tank. Tanks go down sheepishly, they’re good for that, but try lifting them up and balancing them in thin air of your exhaustion and your antimechanical inclinations – then you might have a problem. Any bravado seems like a macho idea until you realize you’re going to do it alone, lying on your bare back under the tons of metal. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art. I spent my life trying to play chess like him. Most of these gangsters have. But we’re like forgers. We’re competent fakes. You want to know what I want. I’ll tell you what I want. I want back what Bobby Fischer took with him when he disappeared: the art of devotion. Object matters none, it’s all inside looking out. For me, introspection is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the street. It seems that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as I have it at the Von’s parking lot, or in the desert, or in the souls of the men I converted to my creed. My mind, it is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one’s exhaustion; but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy. Yet beware: listening too closely might drive you insane; or at the very least, disturbed. You’ll definitely need a Foster’s after this. It isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts: eloquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the desires and affections, captivating the willing hearers, and subduing their understanding. He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

  Shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods as well as his own, he finally reaches the plateau, only to realize the ancient wisdom of an apple appearing gorgeous on a tree branch, while drifting into an unrelated object in his hand: Mission Lakes Boulevard stretches forever rolling up and down, with no shade, no pedestrians, no stores; maybe that cop is still there, high above the intersection with Santa Cruz and its stop signs, vulturing to increase the city revenue by splitting hairs of the Achilles versus the tortoise Zeno’s paradox.

He shakes himself and gulps, then takes a step. At first it is like being at the dentist’s, when he grabs a root with a pair of forceps, and pulls; the pain grows, your head threatens to burst. Afterwards you long for the moment when the pain ceased, but it always comes back coupled with that pair of forceps. He turns his head back towards the town way down below, shrugs it off, well, you know... experience is a muffled lantern that throws light only on the bearer; it's incommunicable. Truth is inedible. It’s a test that nothing can withstand. In a moment you’ll know where you are at. There won’ be anything left but ideas, and there’s nothing frightening about ideas. With ideas nothing is lost, everything can be straightened out. You put up with it for an hour, you’ll need two weeks to recover.

What truth, anyway? This town has no truth to offer, none to hide. It’s just a habitat fancier than those caves used to be, adjusted for time the  same way inflation gets recalculated over the years, if at all. And this stillness of life does not in the least resemble a peace. It is the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looks at you with a vengeful aspect. The most important adjustment here is destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems yours from what seems worthless. Perhaps he should drop the groceries, drop the dry fuel pump, and simply run? There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors. Because the map you are using does not indicate the town of Desert Hot Springs. How inconsiderate on the part of the cartographers – I’ll bet they didn’t forget to indicate their own pitiful hometowns – but they gladly left you hanging in this thin airless environment, nonexistent to them due to its invisibility on their own map. They don’t see you dissipating with some rather diffuse emotion which gradually resigns itself to its own fatal vagueness, as if that it’s a fate against which there is no possible appeal.

As the distance passes it becomes obvious, at first imperceptible, that the word I, as if it has suddenly become obscene or rude or banned from dictionary, is defying him; that he would employ all kinds of evasions and periphrases to replace it. This event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective, because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently. It feels like a preview of the coming attractions, without any clue what’s cooking behind the oven-hot horizon. If you just walk and observe, he argues, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things – that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline, and you have to practice it until your memory becomes accessible again, and show you where you once stopped. So one day –  once you leave Desert Hot Springs and its flares – they could whine: he spent time among us, betrayed us by leaving us, and took his reminiscence along. Across the city borders and beyond, into a world we don’t grasp and could care less about – into the hands of a sect of intellectual castrati. Well, he argues, the fact may be accepted, but their simian reasoning raises a doubt: nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American literary public.

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Bigger Than A Tennis Ball

by Guy J. Jackson

            Got several boxes of birthday gifts for my birthday a month late. Of course I didn’t know what the gifts were beyond (inside) their wrappings but I also didn’t know who the gifts were from, who what where the gifts were from, the return addresses were towns in the U.S. and France I had never heard of and the people had names like Steve Anne, names I didn’t know. STEVE ANNE, STEVE ANNE, I sat there repeating aloud to myself in the space between my mind and my mouth before opening the gifts. STEVE ANNE, STEVE ANNE. And how disappointing they all were, mundane gifts except for one, but largely mundane. Someone called Marcy Tom had sent me a pile of white undershirts, someone named Cedric Jane had sent me a toaster. It was all stuff I didn’t much need or want to love anyone for. Except for this one small lamp. No bigger than a tennis ball. I know that’s not the same relative shape but still. I waited for dark and plugged the lamp in and the glow it cast was grainy and warm and the kind of thing you could get behind if you were feeling nostalgic for an era that had never been. The return address on that package was a town in either Alabama or Arkansas, for both the town and state abbreviation were illegible. And the sender’s name was Madeline Mark, either that or Mark Madeline. Sometimes it’s the last name first with these people.

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we take off our rain soaked socks

by Dan Hogan

[View the story "______________" on Storify]