Thursday, March 20, 2014

___ as if ___ by some revolution of the heart

She turned away from the window and looked at Joe like some girl overcome by a revolution of the heart and buried her face in her hands and said, all the cows were dead. They were all dead, Joe, my God. All of them.

He breathed deeply and deliberately. He breathed like a diver before a descent.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Johnny had been known to mistreat women in ordinary ways. In endearing ways. He himself had even been known to lose in what people call the game of love, but it was not winning that was important to him, but to play the game at all times. He felt as a child at play, if you will, in all social interactions, and had the same notion of perpetual safety. And so the more horrible that the man pointing the gun at Johnny had no such notion of safety. The game the man with the gun played had come to an end, and now it was time to acknowledge its conclusion and to transfer the wagers lost, and so Johnny took the bullet in his chest, and the man took Johnny's ears.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

 I watch her every move, the way the light treats her skin, and the small harrowing journeys her voice takes me on.
 She talks to me about the writer Bruno Schlitz. We are visiting his childhood home, and she tells me that she is glad the old maze of apartments where his father went insane is still there, because they easily could not have been, and that it is exactly as she imagined.
 What she loves becomes what I love.
 I imagine for a second that she had never found the book of short stories as a young girl, and that her love of him was only the consequence of familiarity and that her assurances were trivial, and that which I witnessed on an overcast day in the downtown of a small country in eastern Europe is not an irreversible turn of the universe's notion of a destiny, but a trivial iteration of an algorithm, and this is the only way I could momentarily escape my curse, the only way I could ease the suffocation of my love.
 Then she told me that she was hungry and to light her cigarette.

She awoke me to tell me about her dream. She was a young girl and she was with an older girl she knew from the neighborhood. She met the girl as she walked back from the grain mill. The girl carried in her hands a basket of wheat just fresh from the mill and she began to say what a coward her father was. Then she said the girl took the basket of wheat and spilled it out into the road. She talked to me in her morning cigarette breath that I refused to believe she was not aware of and she asked me, why would she do that. Just throw away a basket of wheat.
 I don't know.
 She just threw it in the street. Why would she do that.
 I don't know. It's your dream.
 She laid her head on my chest and thought a while and then looked at me. I think I just remembered that her father abused her.
 Abused?
 Yeah.
 Like in real life?
 No, in the dream.
 He abused her in the dream?
 No, I remembered that he abused her in the dream. I think she told me.
 I wanted to tell her to brush her teeth, but she would only roll her eyes at me, and then pretend to be pissed off the rest of the day.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

The old indian compacted his body and folded his arms against his chest like paws and looked up and said, the jaguar crawled. He spread his arms up and out and said, and the eagle flew. It flew over the tops of the trees and it saw everything. Everything. It saw the jaguar and the man and what was within the man. He pointed to the boy, and he saw what was within the heart of the man, and the man walked among the trees and asked the jaguar and the eagle if he could hunt for his people a pig, and the jaguar spoke, and said you may. When the man had found his pig with which to feed his people, the jaguar spoke again, he said you must not return to your people, for you have offended me. The man asked the jaguar how could he offend him, and the jaguar said, but you did not ask me what I wanted of you. And the man asked what he could give a jaguar that he did not have, and the jaguar said, you must kill your neighbor's neighbor. And the man asked why, and the jaguar said, because your people have taken too much. Because your people have taken too much and the debt is large. And the man said, I cannot kill my neighbor's neighbor, for they are a distant cousin of mine, and the jaguar said then I will take your child in the night. The old indian put his chest out and closed his eyes and sat with his legs crossed and said, so the man stood in the jungle and peered into his village and watched the children of his people at play. He stood in the jungle and he did not know what to do and he thought like this for a long time. He finally asked the jaguar, what did the last man do, and the jaguar said that the last man did what the jaguar asked him to do and his family was large and happy. The man put down the pig and he said that he did not want many sons, and that he could not kill his cousin, and so he left the pig there for the jaguar. And the jaguar took the pig from him and left the man there, but the man took frog from the river with him when he left. He took the frog's poison from it and he placed it at the end of an arrow and he came back to the jungle and he found the jaguar asleep beside the pig and then shot the jaguar with the poison arrow and the jaguar ran at the man to kill him, but he was slowed by the poison, and all the man's village was behind him. They ran the jaguar down and killed him and the eagle saw them, and now the eagle warns the jaguar of man's presence, and the man of the jaguar's, and man no longer kills his neighbor's neighbor. He hunts the jaguar when the jaguar threatens to take his child in the night, and that man, that first man who hunted the jaguar, he is our father and his family is this tribe. That is why we hunt and jaguar and why we do not kill our neighbor's neighbor.
The man lapsed by the world. The fantasies of who he was to become outpaced him and the memory of them lingered there in his past life which was the life of a man apart from the man he was. He stood there resigned in what violence he was capable of manifesting and he watched Joe and Joe watched him without watching. The game threatened to begin. It was a game wherein the consequence of losing was destruction and he saw that Joe was well versed in such play. He saw that Joe endeavored to pretend such a game was not imminent and he left Joe there and rode fast and watched his trail and hoped never to run into a man such as Joe again, and if he did, that he would know the man as a killer of killers.
The girl dressed as a boy, and played as a boy, and perhaps saw herself as a boy in the eyes of the strangers she approached in the street. Her ankles thin and hairless there under pants undersized or of a peculiar fashion. Her bindle strapped to her back with a belt. Her conversation was charming, and varied in subject, though not in intent, and in her rallies with herself between near misses she fantasized that the men she approached saw in her a young apprentice or a charming companion who could help to fulfill yearnings of a paternal nature. But the men, for all their graceful courtesy, entertained no such notions, or thought much of the girl at all.

Saturday, March 1, 2014

On the back of resumes, he writes the kind of novel that has an introduction. His cat is about to have babies, and he's decided that he's going insane because he sleeps too much.