Author:

By Aaron Burch, D.T. Robbins, and Kevin Maloney

I. LOVE IS A LIFE TAKER

I knew soon as I saw him this guy was going to give me trouble. Same as I knew soon as X told me about James at work they were going to have an affair; same as I knew my dad would be of no help when I called for advice but I did anyway, if only so I could feel mad at him instead of myself; same as I knew soon as the guy at REI started answering my questions about which tent was best I’d buy whichever one he recommended, same as I knew I’d never take that tent out of its box but I liked the idea of myself as a guy who threw a tent into his trunk and set out on an adventure and I was toying with the idea of becoming different ideas of myself; same as I knew it was a bad idea to go to that ATM back near the bathrooms and withdraw as much it would let me, same as I knew I would lose it all same as I’d lost everything I’d walked into the casino with but, fuck it, why give up on letting things go now; same as I knew soon as I saw this bar from the road that nothing good could come from stopping here, same I knew they’d have my heartsongs on the jukebox, and that was what I needed — not a new tent, not some emotional fatherly advice, not one more turn as shooter while everyone around the table cheered me on, but a little time in a dive bar in a town I’d never been in finding new ways to lose things I didn’t know I had.

I ordered a bourbon and coke, threw it back like it was a shot, set the glass down on the counter like placing a baby bird back in the nest it fell out of. Ordered another, carried it with me to the juke. 

He was already there, like waiting for me. And he was first, fine, whatever. It’s true. No big deal. I just wanted to queue up something next, before anyone else got in line or he loaded up a whole night’s worth. It’s happened before. Next thing you know, it’s last call and you never even got your songs, just threw away more money at problems that never went away. So, sure, I looked over his shoulder, but I wasn’t trying to monitor his choices or anything. I didn’t give a shit what he played, but I was curious. Couldn’t help myself. Curiosity killed the growing pile of bad ideas, I guess. 

This guy turned around, saw me spying.

“You have a problem, shithead?”

“I’ve got lots of problems,” I said. I wasn’t trying to be clever. It just came out. I think I’d been needing to hear myself say it out loud. For someone else to hear me say it. To make my confession.

“This will help you feel better,” the guy said, and gave me the most sincere, genuine smile I could remember being on the receiving end of. It broke my heart.

I looked at the juke, and at the very instant I saw that he’d cued up “Scar Tissue,” I heard him say, “People can say whatever they want, but John Frusciante is the heart and soul of the Chili Peppers.”

Jesus goddam fuckin’ shit. A Frusciante guy? 

II. THE FRUSCIANTE GUY

I was sitting at the bar, drinking my third or fourth pint since the doctors pumped the Vicodin and Smirnoff out of my stomach. I’d just gotten out of the hospital. Technically, I wasn’t discharged. My right arm still had a plastic tube coming out of it. It was dribbling blood all over the counter. It didn’t matter. The patron to my left kept flicking a cigarette lighter under his knuckle hair, and the bartender, from what I’d overheard, had a warrant out for his arrest for armed robbery. This was the kind of establishment where a little blood on the counter was expected. 

I noticed a jukebox in the corner and recalled an article I’d read recently while doing a stint in Washoe County Penitentiary. It was about the healing power of music. A team of sadists masquerading as scientist had cut the arms and legs off a hundred innocent geckos, then measured their ability to regenerate limbs while listening to Mozart. Their conclusion was that Mozart helped. The scientists received an award. Not a word about the havoc they’d wreaked on those terrified amphibians.

I needed something like that. Not Mozart, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers. In particular, the song where Anthony Kiedis sings about living under a bridge shooting heroin all day, then gets an idea and puts a sock on his penis and becomes a millionaire with a house in Malibu and six model girlfriends. I wondered if something like that could happen to me.

I walked over to the jukebox and was fishing around in my hospital gown, hoping to find some money, when a guy in a Seattle Mariners cap walked up behind me and breathed down my exposed neck like he was going to goose me or jam a knife into my kidney.

I spun around and said, “You gotta problem, shithead?”

“I have a lot of problems,” he said, wiping his nose.

I laughed. He was clean-shaven and wearing Blundstones. He had all his teeth. The only problem he had was deciding whether to spend his ill-gotten tech money on cryptocurrency or at an all-inclusive eco-resort in Papua New Guinea.

“Well, this’ll make you feel better,” I said and queued up “Scar Tissue” on the Wurlitzer. I stood back triumphantly, but I hadn’t put any money in it. The machine only responded to capitalist contributions. 

I tried to explain my situation… about Mozart and geckos and John Frusciante, who spent a decade shooting heroin and talking to ghosts, then got sober and recorded the greatest album of all time. 

Seattle wasn’t listening. He pushed past me, dropped a quarter in the jukebox, and pressed a series of buttons that summoned “Say It Ain’t So” by Weezer. 

There have been many terrible songs written by many terrible bands since man first banged two stones together and called it music, but somehow this Bitcoin bro picked the worst one. 

Bad feelings seized me. I remembered the hospital giving me medicine that was supposed to make me sleepy, but I was seized by a tremendous energy. I grabbed an empty bottle off a nearby table and cracked it over Seattle’s head.

Instead of falling to the floor like a regular person, he just stood there staring at me, trying to fathom what had happened. He opened his mouth to say something as blood ran into his eye. 

“You cock-rock motherfucker,” he whispered and took a swing. 

It was the strangest thing. I dodged his punch, but the drugs I was on made it so that only my mind moved to the left, while my body remained in place. My face took the full force of the punch. I watched myself fall to the floor.

Seattle started dancing. He was completely insane. Maybe he had real problems after all.

III. Imprints of Others

After too much codeine, the original owner of the bar fell asleep at the wheel and barreled into a center divider. When his wife signed the bar over to me, she lamented he was unconscious as the flames ate him away. Some women want you to die twice. Some men deserve it. If you ask my ex, she’d concur I was one of them. Long story short, I steer clear of Jacksonville. 

These days, the bar is a mural of hopelessness. From the cigarette ash and spilt beer on the counter to the sawdust and dried blood on the floor, this pocket universe is a meat grinder. Yet, desperate souls flood this place every night aiming to untether themselves from fear and insecurity and other lower vibrations and touch something eternal. Not a church or a synagogue or the YMCA. Here. A bar that hasn’t changed the urinal cakes in…who knows how long.

Take these two incandescent assholes for example. 

I watched the redhead in the hospital gown spill bare-assed through the doors. He clambered up the barstool and asked for a craft beer. I said we have one IPA. He wanted a taster. It missed his mouth entirely, trickled down his chin like a child at a water fountain. He ordered two pints. He had no money, but I’m the patron saint of the downtrodden. For the next hour or so, he conversed solely with the demons in his mind. 

When Mr. Seattle walked through the doors, he looked both ways like he was crossing the fucking road. He ordered a bourbon and coke. No lime. I left two in a shot glass anyhow. When life loses its flavor, I guess it doesn’t matter, does it?

They waltzed around the jukebox, squaring one another up. Under the neon glow of the Bud Light sign, I guessed the redhead was either smiling or baring teeth. Mr. Seattle dropped a quarter in, and some song started playing. I don’t much hear the music anymore. Everything outside of Molina and Hank sounds like broken bottles and muffled sobbing. 

A bottle rained down over someone’s head and another person’s fist cracked across the other person’s face. The redhead crumbled like a paper man. Mr. Seattle stood triumphant until a shard of glass went into his calve. He watched blood seep through his khakis like it was happening to someone else. He slunk onto the redhead. They rolled around on the ground like two virgins fucking for the first time. 

Mr. Seattle screamed, “You ruined everything!” 

The redhead went, “I am the eater of worlds!” 

Mr. Seattle yanked what looked to be an IV tube out of the redhead’s arm. Blood sprayed like a geyser. The redhead laughed, maniacal and free. Mr. Seattle got blood in his eye, which accelerated his pure fucking rage. His arms became windmills, missing most of the shots but landing a few that made the redhead go cross-eyed. Still, the redhead seemed to be enjoying himself—ass hanging out, covered in blood and beer, shouting about doing heroin under a bridge. The rest of the bar, its beautiful spectators of brave men who put a single arm out in front of the women for a feigned sense of protection, nodded their heads from the fight to me, the fight to me, the fight to me. I can never have my own problems. Everyone else has to lump their fucking issues in too. 

I grabbed them by their clothes and met their eyes. The redhead was dazed. Mr. Seattle blubbered. 

“Take this shit outside,” I said, “and work it out. Or don’t fucking come back.” 

As I locked the front door at closing, they were sat on the curb outside, sharing a forty and a pack of smokes. 

A bar is least lonely when there’s no one in it but you. There are imprints of others who were there before. Memories. Good, evil, human. At some point these memories transmogrify into one being. One ghost. I’ve been riding with the ghost. I’ve been doing whatever he told me.

*******

Aaron Burch, D.T. Robbins, and Kevin Maloney’s collective top three favorite books of the last year are (in alphabetical order) Birds Aren’t Real, The Red-Headed Pilgrim, and Year of the Buffalo.

By Mike Wheaton

Today, as always, I passed the Walmart, Sam’s Club, Lowe’s, Chipotle, and Starbucks just before turning into the parking lot of my one-building community college campus. It’s in a part of Orlando called Lake Nona™. The trademark symbol is real. If I kept driving, I’d pass the high school next to a middle school next to an elementary school next to a Publix shopping center. Hitting a third straight red light, I stuck my hand out the window and wondered if writing a book about my inescapable consumer semi-reality might be my ticket to another school back up north with old buildings and historical plaques next to the doorways.

I’m taking a break from grading in my office on campus now. I made my first-year writing students take a position on the packet of questionable discourse I provided about how—or to what extent, if any—addictive social media use on smartphones plays a role in mental health. Most of their theses so far claim that, basically, the role is huge and the effect is bad. Even with sources to use, as their papers go on, the evidence is mostly anecdotal: it hurts when they share and don’t get many likes, or when others share something and do get hundreds of likes, or when they compare themselves to the curated surface life of the people in posts with hundreds of likes, or those whose numbers extend into the thousands. They feel worse still when they post more in attempt to make up for the disparity and get fewer likes than before in return.

My office on campus has a window. I used to be a substitute teacher, and somehow my much better job is still not enough for me. I sit in my swivel chair with this document on the screen and I’m looking outside at the Applebee’s—oh wait, that’s a Chili’s—and I’m remembering the time I took over a seventh-grade English class for three weeks twelve years ago. This was home in Jersey, before I moved again to Florida. Middle schoolers didn’t have social media accounts then. One day the lesson plan prompted me to teach a short story about kids during the Civil War who pretended to be older so they could fight for their side. They were seeking glory, the idea of which had been propagandized on both sides. The students had trouble understanding this. Why would they sign up to die like that? 

I said, Let’s do a poll. How many of you want to be famous one day? Every damn hand in the room shot up. Now keep your hand up if you believe you will become famous. The hands didn’t budge, fingers reaching to the ceiling. 

Out the window of my office, I can’t quite see the manmade lake from which this part of the city took its trademark. They’re building a fresh Holiday Inn in my sightline. Now I’m thinking about the class period earlier in the semester before the discourse packet, when I asked for how many students is their smartphone the last thing they see before they sleep and the first thing they see when they wake. Every damn hand in the room shot up. 

In this same class, when I asked the students to fill out a form about the credibility and usefulness of a source, a quarter of the students wrote down the number of views a video had on YouTube or the number of shares it received on Twitter. I didn’t even take off points. I get the confusion. I make my little note in the feedback. I know how students can be about their grades. The numbers, more than anything, matter. The numbers, they’re told, are revealing to people with powerful opinions. They don’t matter, except of course they do, because a while ago people decided they did, and it’s probably too late to change since it’s easier to try getting the right numbers or settle into whatever other people believe the numbers do reveal about you. 

My phone buzzes face-down on my desk. Little Apple logo shining at me. I flip it—a screen of notifications: missed FaceTime, Amazon receipt in my Gmail, new Bank of America offer, a few likes on Twitter, someone going live on Instagram, a prompt for food from Uber Eats, an episode of Filmspotting for download, a trade in my ESPN fantasy league. I’m struck for a moment by how much my phone screen looks like Lake Nona™, or how much Lake Nona™ looks like my phone screen. All the squares of logos. Disney World, after all, is only fifteen miles west. But I remember, too, years ago when Amy and I rented a room in the lower east side of Manhattan for three weeks. One night, a local told us that decades ago this part of the city was littered with needles on the streets and creeps walking in the shadows, and now cleaned up and sold off, it’s a tourist town. I mean, we were vacationing there. He kind of missed the needles. 

Years later, Amy and I bought a single-family pitch-roofed ranch in a part of Orlando with streets that wind through tunnels of live oaks. It predates Disney and affordable AC. When we first drove through, looking for a home, Amy said, I love it. It’s so Old Florida. Each neighborhood in the suburb looked as if preserved from the late 1950’s. The super-highways rumbled farther up the main roads. I liked the area too. It did seem more authentic, but in the context of this sprawl, it was just another brand to choose. 

Class in five. I’m not prepared. I can’t write a book about the inescapability of consumer semi-reality anyway without misplacing value on the number of people who, if they don’t buy it, at least know I did. And what to say about the fact really? Congrats, there is quite possibly no such thing as history except what sold. Go for the glory. Quantify me. Inflate my grade.

*******

Michael Wheaton’s writing has appeared in Essay Daily, DIAGRAM, Bending Genres, Rejection Letters, HAD, and other online journals. He edits Autofocusand hosts its podcast, The Lives of Writers. Find links and more at mwheaton.net.

By Adam Soldofsky

Process 
It was unpleasant, but I’d been in the military. The lines were incredible yet they moved  along towards intake. My neck was stiff. It was uncomfortable to look over my shoulder.  We exchanged glances. Few of us spoke. It was all fairly obvious. The sky above was a  boiling pixilation that exploded perpetually on the horizon.  

Posterity 
In the hangers they blasted our eyes with lights and waved little wands. They snapped our  photograph against an eggshell backdrop. There was some confusion with the names.  Trouble with certain accents. There was mumbling, mishearing. Embellishment.  Truncation. Poetry underwrote posterity once again. I fed my name to the manglers, then  waited with baffling hope to be issued identification, a card they printed on the spot. 
 
Halfway 
I sat in the chair across the desk from the caseworker in her cubicle. The walls were  pinned with the drawings of children. Her perfume lay claim to the air. She asked  questions, returning my answers as she marked in the file:
Unmarried.
Parents: still living. 
Oldest son. 
Ran away from home to join the war.
I was handed a number of vouchers. We discussed my options for shelter, nearest relatives or a halfway house. 

Subdivision
The house was in a subdivision in the Western District. The Underworld was entirely  communities of this sort. Immaculate. The paint, tactful. The turf, orderly and green.  Picture windows. Sacred geometry. Little parks. Plaques beneath the statues. 
My room was cozy. The residents were men, old and young. Some were talkative.  Others kept to themselves. I was partial to the latter. The house rules were displayed in a  frame in the common area and read as follows: 
Clean up after yourself. 
Share in household chores. 
Attend all mandatory meetings and classes. 
Maintain employment or pursue an education. 
Keep all appointments with your case manager. 
Report any and all progress or adversity.
 
Revelations 
I went to the meetings. I attended the classes in the little room at the community center.  The topics were abstract or pragmatical. One of the first concerned the lack of Justice.  This was of much interest to me, as I had done some killing and wondered about the  moral implications. Some of us had suspicions back in life. But we did not gloat to the  others. People expected revelations. The rest of us tried to be sensitive. There was  unlimited access to counseling. 

Euphemism 
I enjoyed the classes, thought less of the meetings. My case manager had enrolled me in  two support groups. One was for Veterans of the Trojan War. The other was Coping with  Your Unglamorous Death. 
In the veterans group, I felt out of place. I hadn’t died in combat. I was more than  a little ashamed of my death. There was some snickering when I told of it. I expected as  much. The group leader thanked me and I sat down. Later he found me and pressed my hand between his two. His sincerity was profuse but clearly authentic. He told me it was okay. 
What can you do, I said. 
My horse kicked me, he said. 
Excuse me? 
Not her fault. A wasp stung her flank.  
 Oh. Sorry.  
It happens. 

Apotheosis 
The group for Unglamorous Deaths was at first a sad affair. Later it became very funny. I  was obliged to tell about the drunkenness, the climbing atop Circe’s terrace to sleep nearer  the stars. The morning call to ship, my subsequent panic, tumble, broken neck. There  were worse deaths assembled here but I was still very close to mine. The group included  women. We did some socializing outside of the meetings. There was one woman I found  lovely and intelligent, the full details of whose death I’d rather not––t involved an ill-advised bet. 
That she could wrest such dignity from her disgrace was unsettling. Apotheosis is  a term I didn’t know then. My mouth was generally thrown out of rhythm by her  presence. I could speak to her but first I’d have to swallow something jagged. I was  astonished by her interest in me. I was never in love during my life.  You remind me of my grandmother, I told her on a date. 
Aren’t you a flatterer, she said. 
You’d be flattered if you knew her. 
Tell me something about her. 
Well, I said, she began her life a slave-girl. 
I see. 
Her former masters are here. She is not. 

Development 
I was not a brave soldier and this was obvious to my superiors. I was the youngest aboard  my captain’s vessel but that hardly explains anything. I did not enjoy the war. I had  enlisted to escape my father. 
It was a surprise to find myself excelling in the classroom. I scored highly on the  placement tests. I enrolled at the university on scholarship. By now my wife and I had a  little house in the quiet planned community known as Tanglewood. I worked construction  and went to school. There was a lot of development in the Underworld at that time. My  wife pursued her certification in counseling. Eventually she found work mentoring girls. 
I continued to visit the discussions at the community center. When we discussed  the Memory Question the room was always split. We must preserve the recollections  from our days of life, urged the Rememberers. For some this required heroic diligence.  The Forgetters supported oblivion for the purposes of comprehensive assimilation. They  were sometimes accused of taking this position simply to legitimize the eating of lotus.  The two camps got along for the most part, despite the difference of opinion. Though  they tended to vote opposite each other. 
I was not dogmatic myself, holding on to what was pleasant and burying the rest.  One Rememberer, enlivened by the debate, stood up and declared: 
Every soul in this room has one recollection that validates all that is disagreeable. You, she pointed at me. Give us yours! 
Sailing in black night, the algae blooming like a cosmos off the coast of Malea. 

Vanishing 
My neighbor had been a prophet of doom when he was alive. Now he was a mechanic. A  nice man. We’d have conversations in our driveways, mornings when I went out to  collect the newspaper. I was now an academic. My dissertation—The Civic  Disadvantages of Memory in the Absence of Justice—had been published and I was  offered a post at the University. What would my father say? In all the years I lived under  his roof I never once saw him impressed.  

I told my neighbor about my wife wanting children. How I wasn’t sure. How I  worried about the Vanishing.  
Everybody worries about that, said my neighbor. 
Don’t you? I said. 
Oh sure––I have a group, he said. We meet Sundays before football. 
Death had not meant an end to mystery. Souls vanished routinely from the  Underworld. Those that returned after days, weeks or months had nothing to report.  No idea they’d been gone. Many did not return. Thus I worried about becoming a parent. Children are adaptable and resilient, said my neighbor. 
There was no end to the children entering the Underworld. 
It is our responsibility to open our home, said my wife. 
She tended to appeal to reason when she wanted something. It was convenient  how duty and desire coalesced so seamlessly in her. I hated to interfere with her  happiness. Her love was a dynamo beneath us.Compromised, it would lead to  destruction.  
We put our names on the waitlist.
 
Ecstasy 
When the child arrived my love ballooned dangerously. If I looked too long upon the  little girl, particularly when she rode on my wife’s hip, I would begin to tremble like a  rocket. This condition was somewhat alleviated when I held a camera. 
We went often to the park. We visited the sleek shopping mall. The floors  gleamed underfoot. The selection stole my breath. We went for drives. The hedges along  the roads, the rows of houses nearly identical and wheeling in all directions propelled me  toward ecstasy. I took far too many pictures. There were fountains in the public squares.  
Flowers in the beds. There were street fairs. Markets and bazaars. I enjoyed anything  which brought me into proximity with my compatriots. Our assembly seemed the proof of something important.

Pastime 
We hosted parties in the backyard. Invited our colleagues and they brought their  children. I built a swing set. The children chased each other about the yard and flitted at  our knees. The adults sat on the patio and discussed the newest speculation surrounding  the Emperor and Empress. Their role in government was now purely symbolic. Thus their  private affairs became the national pastime.  
She has no shame, said one. 
Neither does he. 
Well, I think she’s worse. Look how she dresses. 
Look how he flaunts his infidelity.  
She’s much worse, said another. She was nothing before they met. He plucked her  from obscurity and set her down in luxury and adoration. 
They both ought to have some shame, said another. 
What use is shame in the Underworld? said my wife. 
Just when I felt it impossible to fall any further in love she would say something  like that. 
I don’t know, said someone, but I feel they ought to have a little. 

Captive 
Couldn’t we have another? 
Well. We certainly have the room. 
That’s hardly the point, my dear.  
I know. 
I want another one. I feel we’re ready. 
Me too. 
And we do have the room. 
We wrote back to the agency. Our application was approved and a second child, a boy,  was placed in our care. He was shy. He did not take to us so readily. He watched us carefully and we watched him. During this time I dreamed of Odysseus. Seldom did I  wake dry, without the tremendous outrage for which I could not account slamming in my  ribcage. A captive on a sinking ship. 

Disposition 
I took walks under the ever-rippling canopy worrying about the boy. He went long  periods without speaking. He’d cut large notches from his hair with kitchen shears. While  I lay in bed fear and love tore over the tracks of my nerves on a collision course. My wife  is an effortless sleeper. Immediately embroiled in a dream,she is what my mother would call an unbothered soul. Lying beside her, the children lost in  the dark of their rooms, the ruthless oceanic quiet of the street lapping against the window, I felt utterly removed from grace.
 
Tessellation 
Though he took me on it was clear Odysseus was bothered by my presence. I was  roughly the age of the son he’d vanished from. Sometimes when he was giving orders he  could not bring himself to look at me. Then the desire to please him would incandesce  my bones. Now I was feeling this way about the boy. I would relive any horror to know  his thoughts. Preparing him for school was like dressing an idol. Meanwhile, the girl  thrived. She needed us for shelter. Transportation. The rest she could manage. I felt  childish in her presence. She tolerated my kissing her when I dropped them at school. The  boy followed along through the double doors, his steely hermetic aura wavering about his  little shoulders.  
I went on to the University. Gave lectures. Saw students in my office. Tried to appear composed. Drove home through the tessellating neighborhoods. Kissed my wife.  Inquired about the children. Performed my part in the meal. Afterwards loaded the  dishwasher. Read the paper. Put the children to bed. Spoke idly with my wife on the sofa. They’re enforcing the beard policy at the University, I told her. 
Are they really? 
Yes. 
Everybody has to grow one? 
Only the men. 
I’m sorry about that. 
Do you mind a beard? Not terribly. 
And if there were a lot of grey in it? 
You’d look distinguished. 
You wouldn’t leave me for a younger man? 
Not if he wore a beard.  
Young men grow the most disastrous beards. 
I’m glad you’re not a young man. I would probably have to leave you. 
Went upstairs to bed. Lay with my wife until she was asleep. Lay awake, the the  world above bearing down. Darkening. Day in and out.
 
Storming 
I came home, set down my damp coat and briefcase. Dried my beard on my sleeve. The  girl was at the table with her homework. The boy sat on the floor. He would only wear  white during this period. He had on white coveralls atop a white t-shirt. White socks and  sneakers. He was drawing things on his arms with a red marker. 
Where’s your mother? 
The girl shrugged.  
I went upstairs. I came back down. 
Where’s mom? Her car’s in the driveway. 
The girl looked up from her assignment. 
Maybe she went for a walk. 
But it’s storming. 
We regarded each other. The boy started with the marker on his legs. I looked in the backyard and in the garage. 

What’s for dinner? 
I don’t know. 
I’m hungry.
I looked to a small gesture of agreement from the boy.

I fed the children. I bathed them and put them to bed. 
She’ll be back, said the girl.  
She was always right. 

I checked on the boy. He lay dreaming like a pharaoh with his arms folded over  his chest.  
I went downstairs. Sat on the sofa and faced the front door. Light entered from the  street shredded through the blinds and shuddered on the walls. I shook under the blanket.  The storm kept on. 

Glyphs 
Days and weeks. The children were adaptable and resilient. I considered joining a group.  I lectured and graded papers enveloped in an unruly lavender fog. I saw to the children  though it felt like the reverse. 

Don’t worry, said the girl. It’ll be okay.
 
Where did she come by this riddle? 
The boy clothed himself in white. Each day he covered his body in red glyphs.  Each night I wiped them away in the bath. The weather was strange. The sky was  lowering around us. 
Don’t worry, Dad. 
Finish your breakfast.
 
Threshold 
The firmament fell to the land like a dark bridal gown. I needed to buy groceries. I’m going to the Superstore. 
No thanks, called the girl. 

The boy stood up from the floor covered in his own crimson language and took  my hand at the threshold.  
We drove through shattered element rebounding from the streets and hurried  through the parking lot under the umbrella. I’d made a list but found it soaked.  Incoherent. Chaos clapped me on the back. I began to weep. People stared. The boy took  my hand. Led me down the florescent aisles. I filled the cart.
 
Prism / Oaths 
We hustled to the car and unloaded the groceries. There was a great clamoring taking  place around us. I held up the visor of my hand and looked off towards the edge of the lot  where shoppers were descending and crying out. There the gale had twisted and upturned  the low sky and left it an aqueous vertical prism. We began to weave through the  vehicles, moving with the crowd towards the spectacle.  
The shoppers were swarming at a cleft in the low firmament where fires burned in  the body-cavities of two bovine corpses, behind which living men dressed in armor were  praying oaths over their bloody swords. Among them was Odysseus. A tremor swept over  me. Then another. The boy made a way through the hordes with me in tow. His eyes were  calm and his steps decisive. I felt my tongue begin to glow. 

Hot and Cold 
The crowd peeled away around our progress as from a blistering heat. At the fore the boy  halted and I approached Odysseus where he stood in the dark puddle of his sacrifice. He recognized me at once. He began to weep and clutch his chest while I stood  before him in my raincoat and penny loafers, the damp running off my beard, the groaning multitudes at my back. 
Elpenor, he said. How did you come to the world of darkness, faster than me in  my black ship? 
Indignation scudded through my extremities. I opened my mouth. Out burst my  story like a starved scavenger bird. 

Do not desert me! 
Burn me in full armor! 
Where was this coming from? 
Plant my oar upon my tomb! 
Or else my curse be god’s bounty on your head! 
Was I this soul? I shook with embarrassment.  
My captain placed his hand over his heart histrionically:  
All of this, my unlucky friend, I will do for you. 
Unlucky? 

He smiled like a miser, eyeing passed my shoulder for the soul he’d come in  search of. I went hot and cold. I would spit in his face. I would throttle him and claim his  shield. The boy reached for my hand.  
He stood in his white uniform beneath the umbrella. Little red lights sparked in  the soles of his shoes.

*******

Adam Soldofsky is the author of Memory Foam (poems) and Telepaphone (a novella).