The remnants of some erotic party that never quite got off the ground; an aborted orgy. We wander the aisles of some husk of a grocery store. It isn’t quite post-apocalyptic but the store has maybe a tenth of its usual inventory. Shelves are half-filled or empty, or half-dismantled, or half-smashed or burned, or else […]
Giving blood. Lying on that bed in the bloodmobile. Two tubes running out of my arm. “Are you sure you can spare this much?” Languor. “Don’t drift off.” Everything is funny. Wake up to panic. Tearing down the street. Running; it’s me and two others. The Golden Gate Bridge. San Francisco. Where to run? It’s […]
We are in our living room. It is ours, and yet I do not recognize this place, this cock-eyed curiosity of a room. Perhaps our living room from Barre – the floors certainly are reminiscent of that house – but it is bent and crooked. And a railroad runs through it. When we discover the […]
JP[0], JP[1], JA, and I are all riding in JP[0]’s car on our way to a company-sponsored celebratory ski day at Stowe. (JA doesn’t want to be there; he never does; but he must come because he is up for an award.) Along the way, JP[0] stops for gas. While tanking up, I change all […]
It’s an imaginative confluence of House of Leaves and Edward Scissorhands – the scene rendered in a Burtonesque palette: a narrow swath of rich blacks, blues, greys, whites, and the very rare, very bold singular subject color. The house is already labyrinthine, made oppressively so by a… feeling that something is not quite right. The […]
The party is over, or at least dying down. A few of us have pulled chairs together into a circle to take in a drink and a few minutes rest before continuing. A woman with whom I had once been close, and whom I hadn’t seen in years, sits near me and seems to have […]
It dives deep. It chases. But it chases to save them from their seaward demise. The whale is gigantic. A sperm whale. First it catches the cat, then the mouse. It goes deep after the others. The submarine (Alvin?), the man (E.M.?), the woman (E.H.?). The narrator is but an observer. The whale never swallows […]
At the office. Only the office is in a converted grocery store. Complete with conveyer belt check-out counters. The aisles have all been replaced with the rows of desks. But we’re packed in tight. Practically over capacity. No wait–definitely over capacity. I don’t have a desk to speak of; I’ve been relegated to one of […]
A local hero, running for election. He is young and single, but he is half-retarded–some kind of Big City village idiot of the proletariat. We join our Local Hero and his brother and sister and brother-in-law as they set up for the first big speech of the campaign. It’s at an open air market. Market […]
Teeth. Teeth grinding. Terrible pressure. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure. They break off. A whole row of teeth. Like my body made its own dentures. But they come off in ragged, jagged edges. A U-shaped blade of bone. Shove it back in, clamp down. Try to get those teeth to stay in place. […]