Tag Archives: prose
Brzap! Flashback! scott-1974
First vivid memory. Visiting in Florida
I remember clouds and blond hair. I remember a ring made of tinfoil, and I remember walking on the beach at the age of four, only to stumble and fall on a recently washed up jellyfish with its tentacles still in perfect working order. This was my first introduction to pain, really. Face first into a mound of chemically charged spaghettii and causing me to experience a white light within my head as intense as the sun itself.
inevitable slippery, falling not thinking
the needle penetrates his skin easily, pumping him full of multiple cc’s of a foreign, ghastly substance. human blood, now coursing through his veins. highly hallucinogenic. within moments, he feels his comfortable green skin beginning to peel away from the amorphous membrane that holds his brain in its sac of comfort and delight. his suckers begin to pulse as though a human heart were now beating inside of him; perhaps it is psychosomatic, tales of how that strange hydraulic organ pumps this wild hallucinogen throughout their tiny pink nubs. eventually, his suckers can no longer hold him down, and he begins to float freely, only the saliva tethers keeping him safely connected to the surface of the glans-body below.
Burning Numb
He looked up in the last moment, and saw the giant concrete slab begin to topple toward him; slowly in its speed he felt the slab strike outstretched hands of his, momentum first no weight not yet causing first his arms to bend, the slab now pressing twisting forearms before the weight sinks in, driving him onto his back; one last sacred breath before the weight pins him to the ground, and in that sacred moment does he see immensity, becoming one with concrete so to speak, before the ground kicks in underneath him, patently refusing to getoutatheway; he looked up in that last moment, and saw the giant concrete slab begin to topple toward him.
Touch
It fell from the sky last night.
It dropped down faster than I could follow and stopped without slowing,
just an inch off of the grass outside.
I went out to it.
I had seen it many times before, but never had I come this close.
It had come and gone away, and I had never even touched the thing,
so
I went out to it.
It was a cobalt-blue doughnut, a motionless torus, a flat cylinder with
a hole in the middle like some giant sideways capital O six feet tall.
Its surface was featureless and blank,
and its top and bottom edges terribly sharp.
I slowly reached out, one finger of one, hand, and touched it.
It wasn’t warm, it wasn’t cold, it wasn’t anything,
but after that my clothes started burning me and I had to take them off.
After that I pressed both palms, all fingers, against it,
and still felt nothing but pressure,
but my hair started hurting and I had to pull it out.
The rest of the night, I tried for some response, any sign.
I threw things at it, I yelled at it, I commanded it to open.
I burned my clothes and hair and threw the ashes on top of the thing.
I ran at it like a cop trying to knock down a door.
I tried to climb on top of it, but I couldn’t stay there.
Everything ventured, nothing gained.
At least it stayed longer this time.
Finally, it left. I tried to catch it but it was gone before the knowing.
I suppose I can’t complain. It never really hurt me
and it didn’t do anything I could call unfair.
Still I have this regret, this sense of loss,
as if there was something more I could have done,
something better.
something stronger.
It will come again in a week or month or so.
Maybe then I will get inside.
Maybe then I can touch it.
mind tricks
“365 days a year.
every day.
every night.
every week.
every month.
every hour.
every minute.”
says the back of the shirt belonging to the girl sitting in front of me.
in my head i automatically free-associate, finishing the sequence of
phrases: “women are raped.”
i look back at the shirt, continuing reading, to find out just what is
taking place so frequently.
i see the Nike symbol, and the word
“Basketball.”
oh.