October 2010
9 posts
5 tags
Twenty Four
Jack was rash. He dreamed a foolish dream last night. He dreamed you cared.
5 tags
Twenty Three
And so it seemed right again. Jack knew that he had finally set things right with the world. “Now,” he sighed in relief, “I can move on.” He pushed the button in the center of the little black box and watched the abandoned buildings on the block sprout into a blossoming orchard of flame.
~
The hot wind whistled a childlike melody into his ear. It was a lullaby, and it...
5 tags
Twenty Two
Jack considers his death many times a day. Some days, when his imagination runs riot with his faltering senses, he calls off sick from work and remains in bed, picturing himself as a wilting child melting into the final moments of consumption. Other times, Jack’s mind preys on him with visions of an epically and publicly violent demise. But in all his delusions, he vacillates between these...
5 tags
Twenty One
Jack knows that something is coming. He knows that soon something has to happen — some violent movement from above or below. Or beyond. Without Gabriel, without the dreadful annunciation, without motive, revelation, or reclamation.
~
He won’t be there to see it. It could be worse than what he has planned for himself.
5 tags
Twenty
Jack sat in the middle of the living room floor on a stained, tattered, and vomit-colored rug, trying to breathe less heavily; the noise hurt his head. He hadn’t moved from this spot for as far back as he could remember, and he had relieved himself there many times.
~
Alone and in the dark, Jack sat there smoking, losing himself completely in nicotine dreams. He hadn’t eaten anything in days....
4 tags
Nineteen
Jack does not reside in temples of wood and stone, built by the hands of men.
~
Jack dwells within you and without you.
4 tags
Eighteen
Jack prays before going to bed:
~
Nature shall wipe the unclean beasts from its bosom like a stain, like the blemish we have become. The plague it will visit upon my house will be as a wine to cleanse its palate. The death it must engender through its spite and intolerance shall mend the torn Innocents and heal the bruised earth, where only the brutes have walked.
~
And it shall be proud.
...
4 tags
Seventeen
Jack sits up at night calculating figures for the final solution.
4 tags
Sixteen
Jack takes a drink for each of his failures to communicate.
September 2010
15 posts
5 tags
Fifteen
Jack sits blissfully unaware that his last cigarette is the one that gave him cancer.
4 tags
Fourteen
The colors of Jack’s world run off the canvas.
4 tags
Thirteen
If it rains, wonders Jack, why don’t we go elsewhere?
~
If it hurts to touch a sore spot, why don’t we stop touching it?
~
Jack has no answers.
~
Jack wonders, given time enough and the small triumphs of evolution, why people never learn — why some things never change. He now finds himself confronted with one of those things: he has gone back to work. He has gone and touched the sore...
4 tags
Twelve
A letter arrives in the mail. Jack can see that another envelope is stuffed inside. His father has sent the letter along. On the front, Jack finds the cryptic handwritten message, “Something from the DMV!” His father has punctuated the message with an exclamation mark. His father does this only when he is upset.
~
Afraid to open the letter, Jack throws his keys into the waste bin...
4 tags
Eleven
Jack drives to the market because he should.
~
Jack drives to work because he must.
~
Jack drives himself crazy because he has no other choice.
4 tags
Ten
In front of a dirty tenement, Jack stares at drug lords and slum lords laughing with pimps, ruthless teens arguing with foreign shop keepers, gang members squaring off for a fight, abusive men beating their women until their own hands become horribly bruised, and at the slow, barbaric corruption of the children who, like a rabble of dull and soiled Golems, wait to inherit this earth.
~
Jack...
4 tags
Nine
Coughing in the squalor of a Warsaw ghetto, dismissively brushing lice from one strand of his hair to the next, Jack waits for the last of twelve people to arrive for a final dinner together. His groin burns with the wet fire of the clap he contracted during too many indiscriminate encounters with prostitutes whose faces he can no longer recall.
~
The dun splatters of cooking grease or of old...
4 tags
Eight
Sunday morning — another hung-over Sabbath — Jack panics in bed, unable to free himself from the gnarled and twisted folds of his sheets.
4 tags
Seven
Like a frightened child quivering beneath bed covers after a hideous nightmare, Jack turns up his collar and walks quickly through deserted streets, desperately trying to avoid the image of his shadow on sunless days.
4 tags
Six
Jack waits for the ghostly mourners to emerge from the darkness to spirit him away.
~
Will they lead him to the black coach? Will it be the carriage appointed to escort him to his eternity?
~
And will the footman help him into the carriage, stifling the hint of an indecorous snicker, as Jack listens apprehensively to the departure of the mourners, their spectral voices filling the air with...
4 tags
Five
Jack awoke in a panic, discovering himself fully dressed and slumped on the floor of a bathroom he didn’t recognize. On the mirror, a whorish smear of lipstick displayed the message “Worry and Perversion.”
5 tags
Four
Five o’clock in the evening.
~
Gripped by a sense of fright that he can’t explain, Jack confronts the piece of fruit on the kitchen table. Since breakfast he has been staring at the peach, paralyzed. Finally, he dares to eat it. The universe is disturbed.
5 tags
Three
Dead autumn leaves rustle in the wind. The muddied footprints of children trail away from puddles in the broken pavement. On a bench, holding an empty bag, Jack throws imaginary breadcrumbs to the pigeons and cries.
5 tags
Two
Jack practices smiling in the mirror each day before work. He can describe the sight only as eerie and grotesque.
4 tags
One
Jack understands fear. For Jack, fear comes from the common and the vulgar, because true fear rarely takes the form of big things like nuclear war, widespread famine, catastrophic natural disasters, the death of children, the end of the world, or godlessness and fascism. The big things are unavoidable. The big things are incomprehensible. In the lexicon of fear, these are the mundane things....