Lazy Monday
“Don’t you have work?” Cisca said to the lump on the couch. He stretched lazily, grunting with the knowledge turning over would be the most strenuous task he’d undertake that day.
“I’m bringing sexy back.” he said, eyes still closed in defiance of an encroaching afternoon. “I can see your balls.” she said.
Mirror
The man in the mirror looked at himself looking at himself looking at himself for a time, pondering whom, of the two, was the subject of narration. “Not I” the man said to himself, to which he replied “Not I”. “Aye-Aye” they quipped.
Shower
He watched the water cascade down his body and jet off the edge of his elbow. With the subtlest movements of his arms and head, he controlled the blasting torrents of searing water. Rivers moved at his command over follicle cliffs and forests of dense pubic hair. For those fifteen minutes, he was Mighty.
Contact Lens
The contact lens sat nestled in the deep and dirty scrags of his Barely Used® shag carpet. John searched desperately, late for work, weighted already by the world that had unfocused long before he’d started Sweating to the Oldies. In that blurry self-sufficient living compartment, he groped and pleaded and wept, but never found it. The lens stayed there, tangled in dog hair, refracting the world.
Commute
Silver slivers slipped through the slit; smelly men slapped their knees loudly smiling sincerely. A six-pack sat in the seat beside him, speaking sad stories of Saturday-night solitudes and week-day salvation. The singer behind him started something Salish, and he was gone.
Paprika
“You know how, like, they're always rewriting the bible and shit? And, like, what they find is actually different from what it was, like Jesus was actually a magic mushroom or something? What if, like, it wasn't stigmata? You know, with the holes and shit? What if it was –get this- paprika and Jesus just had spicy hands or some shit?" he said, trying to pierce his own hands with the bloodshot gaze of the prophet-manifest and the intensity of the enormously stoned.
“Shut the fuck up.” Barry from accounting said to the palm-staring Shift Leader for what he hoped to God was the last time.
The Management
“Bitch, where the cheese at?” Stacy said, the words dropping unpleasantly from his mouth like the star-shaped result of dark orange Play-Doh forced through a plastic mold. Like the Play-Doh, they coiled in uneven piles.
Pale Mauve
“I think we should go with pale mauve” she said to her dull-eyed companion, unaware any person unsatisfied with the inherent dullness of mauve itself would be doomed to a world of pale mediocrity. He kept the thought to himself and took her colour sample to the paint mixer.
Mayonnaise
The mayonnaise clung to the sides of the tub, battle-hardened and ready to fight. Where other tubs had succumbed to consumption, this one had remained; its fortress the crevice at the back of the fridge. It is there it had held its ground since time immemorial and lest Mother came, it would remain.
Magnifying Glass
Henry flipped through microfiche prints and newspaper clippings, scrutinizing them with a folding magnifying glass his parents had bought him when he was a boy. He’d begged for it every Wednesday as they shopped passing the novelty and toy shop on the corner. He’d reasoned without it, there would be evil in the world. It had finally come in a kit with a decoder ring and a notebook, both of which he had long-since lost.
At 4 A.M., he slipped the magnifying glass into its pocket and tucked it and the newspapers and microfiche prints snugly away in the locking nightstand by the bed between an old Reader’s Digest and a loaded .22.
Mountains
Jagged and sharp, they cut the sky and tear its flesh away. It bleeds out sun that pools and spreads down the edges and into the sea. Only cosmos remain.
Big World
He sat in his darkened living room lit only by the small fireplace, an empty bottle of gin by his side. His hollow eyes glared into the dance of the fire before him, each lick of flame a memory of what he’d done. A pile of turtle shells stacked carefully in the corner of the room –each one polished-, a few dozen coins lying across the table at his back; these were the things he lived with now. A bloodied hand reached to the bowl on the coffee table to his side and pulled back a hand full of dried mushrooms which he ate slowly, savouring their bitterness. Sarah came in the door cautiously, wary of the rancid smell of iron and rot.
“David? David, are you alright? You havn’t been returning my calls.”
“David’s isn’t here.” he said, eyes anchored firmly to the fire. He forced another handful of mushrooms into his mouth. With otherworldly resolution, some power forced him up out of his seat and with Lovecraftian measure turned to face the one he’d loved so very much.
“Oh my God David. Are you…” she said, unable to finish the thought. David approached, hopping forcefully towards her. The horror of that moment was intensified not by what she could see, but what she could hear; the cackling of the fire, the strained, shallow breathing of her fiancée, and the screeching sound of the rusted springs attached to the bottoms of his shoes.
“It’s-a me…” he said in little more than a whisper. “…A-Maaaario.”
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