In a moment of clarity and inspiration, the second archivist suggested the following plan: track the social trends in our city; map them, finding the inevitable patterns; figure out the dependent and independent variables; create a mapping; and finally, inconspicuously, design public policy to tap into exactly those inputs, in just the right amounts. Prod the organism. Domesticate the animal. Soon, the stochastic trends would form into strands, then chains of strands, then threads. With time, the sum total of human knowledge be kept in the predictable social patterns of our race.
It’s like each of our lives is played out alone, obedient to the rules of a separate game board, the ladders, the squares, following the thread of a unique tale, a tail that curls around until it meets up with its maker, its head, forming a neat ball (transparent, weightless), floating effortlessly on the wind, drifting along alongside billions and trillions of other small balls, all caught up in their own complex narratives.
Yet interestingly, while it is easy enough to peer inside each of these other balls as we pass by them, (noting, as we do so, what its...
We are there. We are in the shadows, in the gaps, in the spaces between words. We are in every moment where you pull away, where discretion replaces narrative, we are there.
We are there in the knowledge that you do not write all things that happen, we are there, waiting in the wings, filling in the gaps, in the spaces.
You did not write us - you never write us, nobody writes us (and who would read us, who would read every banal moment, every second, what soul could stand the painful inevitability of one moment following the next...
The magic of it was so simple, so obvious that she found it hard to beleive that no one else could see it, that no one else had attempted it before.
Just step off the ledge and let everything fall away. Remove the shackles that are holding your feet to the ground. Let go of the mortgage payments, the deadlines, the constant bombardment from advertising companies telling you that you absolutely needed their product in your life.
Forget about the birthday cards you must send or the work emails you need to write.
Realise that they're not important, that none...
I remember when I first saw you. You were walking alone in a park, it was a cool evening it was so late that even the night walkers were in a bed, There you were walking alone in the park, skin fair hair so blonde it was almost white. You wore nothing but a patient's gown. I walk up to you concerned then frightened, you my dearest lamb were covered in a crimson tint. Do you remeber what you asked me you said "help me"
~
"They won't be of any help."
"Why? Did they not see anything?"
"I think they saw too much."
The man in the white coat was right. That was what had happened. We had all seen too much. Too much of the evil that had passed under the sky that night. We had born witness to horrors that no human tongue can describe. And by the way that the animals had fallen silent, not even they knew how to communicate what had happened.
We all sat in silence, those of us cursed to survive. It was by group consensus, unspoken as...
Smell of moss, picked up by wind and lifted by trees. Flash of fire-rimmed eyes, toss of disdainful hair, gold-threaded-with-crimson. Derisive eyes and a tight little mouth, quick to contempt and slow to praise. Slender hands and slender frame roped the man in as easy as you please, and for what seemed like a thousand years promises of glittering gold kept her tethered to him like a
-The thought of having to tell you my life story for forensic reasons, is quite barbaric to me. Is there any other way you can learn what you need to know?
-No. Go ahead. We need a summary of your life in order to rule you out as part of this crime. If we don't have that chronology, we can't do that. It looks very much like you are a perpetrator but this longer timeline will give us context for the short term timeline. Go ahead.
-{Sighs} Okay. As you know, I was born In Mount Auburn, NY. I lived...
She would never use a sippy cup for wine. She just wouldn't. And not because the other mothers would smell the fermentation on her breath. Not because her eyes would gloss over as the nannies began to talk about the hockey-playing "manny" who worked with the two boys at the Sullivans. Not because she would have to hold tightly to the padded grip of the jogging stroller. It wasn't because her Rosacea gave her cheek bones a cherry hue. It had nothing to do with her morning run to the playground, the mile and half she squeezed in everyday.
She...
I shall wait.
I shall wait for the timer to go through it's course.
Wait for the little seconds to pass me by.
Produce nothing of content.
Produce nothing of consequence.
Just words strung together in a jumbled sort of way.
Words become random assortments of letters.
Meaning is lost in the rush to get them out.
It's killing me.
Realizing that six minutes is such a vast distance of time.
And yet my brain cannot seem to function adequately.
I like to sip my stories like brandy.
I like to savor my poems, swish their contents around my mouth...