My best friend is a guy called Peter and he's incredible at talking to people. He has a vault of information in his head that he's gotten from all of his past conversations with people. When he meets someone new he merely tells them what he knows so far about their hometown and then lets them build upon it, this he'll take to the next person he meets from there and so on. I was with him the other day and we were talking to a guy from south africa, we live in australia, and the guy was used to...
The alligator with the cardboard mouth. The whipped cream on the stairs. Hollow clang. Syncopated clatter.
The brighter colors remind me of childhood. Not that adulthood has been faded yellows or softening greys. But a luminescent green or radiant orange triggers my primary nostalgia.
The set is bare. The slice of bread reads 5 in ketchup. A lazy harmonica.
When time runs out here, it starts over there. Follow the alligator king.
We were to meet in the gallery. The glass one, stone fronted with tiles. It is an old place, no longer fashionable. It looks out onto a street where buses no longer run and rubble fills the roads. He said he had a message to give me. The way it was said, it did not imply that the message was from him, but only that he was a messenger, of the most unwilling kind. What inconvenience it must cause you, I might have argued, to have to meet up with me in such way. What a task your people as...
You know how people always use that metaphor of how an iceberg shows a small portion of the story, but the ice travels much deeper underneath? I was quite literally experiencing that right then. Both externally and internally. My chest was burning for air and my body was thrashing up against the coarse underneath of the ice pool. I didn't care that my eyes were stinging or the water in my mouth was gushing down my throat. What may have been a beautiful glistening lake was now a dark trench of terror. I had never known what snow was like...
I've been taught to play it safe since I was a child. Everything always slipped out of my grasp. And I never seemed to mind. Then you managed to come into my life and make scars that, even decades later, will remind me of the love we had. Can you fathom how beautiful that is? I held onto you tightly because you were the only thing that mattered. Please don't say that my love was suffocating you. I couldn't imagine loving you any less. Maybe we were too young to understand what we had. Maybe I was too naive and...
When I was in Beijing, my dear, I saw a small lass with an ape of a face crouched in an alley and weeping for who knows who. I noticed she was wearing the cheap red cape I bought for you in H&M. When I was in Istanbul I saw a knock-kneed street performer whose laugh was the same as yours. Some graffiti that I ran across somewhere on the east edges of Paris resembled your handwriting, when you scrawled notes left for me coming home legless and too late. I say this not to make you think there are...
You can count me out. I'm over it. Through with you, done with everything....That's a lie. Count me in, it's about time, right? Six years is long enough to be apart. I've waited for this; you, maybe not. Either way, the date's approaching. Count me out, though, it might be a bad decision. No...count me in, I can't wait to see you. Remember that summer? Remember that WINTER? No, no, I can't see you, count me out. Count me in, count me out, I can't decide one way or the other. No, for sure, count me in, what am I...
A crappy painting of a girl in headphones standing on the crest of a mountain, surrounded by butterflies. This is what passes for art these days? Seriously, thought Darren, I've seen better finger paintings.
As he made his way from picture to picture, Darren realized that art wasn't really his thing. Eventually, he made his way back to the entrance of the labyrinthine museum and stepped back out into the practical, utilitarian world of the city in which he lived.
Still thinking about the butterfly painting, Darren wandered through the streets of the bustling, monochrome city, occasionally bumping elbows with...
I lost my grip on te wheel. The snow on my windshield was blinding. The ice beneath my tires made my car skid into the guardrail in a sort of slow motion. I could see the front of my car hitting the railing and the hood folding back up toward me. The lights shattered and white and yellow fragments came flying up toward my windshield. The airbags inflated, slow motion, hitting my face, making my head turn sideways. My iPhone flew out of my hand and hit the passenger side window, then slammed to the floor. My dog, Erin, screeched...
A swing. I found my self under one as i awoke to the devestation. Fires raged every which way, how the playground was not on fire I will never know. I decided to walk out, mostly out of fear, and I was horrified with my decision. Right outside the playground, where children played not so long ago, were burned, rotting corpses. They layed therewith out motion, without life, but not without smell. As i hurried back to the playground to retch, I saw out of the corner of my eyes. A woman. Dazed and confused as i was, but still...