Category: micro monday

Everything Is Here, Everything Is Gone | Cressida Blake Roe

You become more man the further east you walk. As the coastal fires darken behind you, the state borders lie in ruins of cinderblock and snapping pylons, but you use them to mark your passage out of womanhood: Arizona, you cut your hair with a stranger’s knife and barter it for bread made more of synthetic polymer and wishful thinking than wheat, but you’ve been eating dreams for months, so it only reminds you of home. Arkansas, you bind your breasts with the fabric you had stuffed into your brother’s stolen boots and let your feet go cold. Alabama, you stop sliding your voice up to the anticipated octave, and Georgia—but Georgia is a dead name; you leave her behind altogether.

The stars are still falling when you reach the ocean, and their dying light allows you to read the overhanging billboard. In the old days, neon swirled through a sign declaring The Republic of New-Nueva-新的 York, but you know that the way you learned the mythology of Martin Luther King Jr. in high school. What’s left of it you can see spells “he Re N or.” Ironic. Because it’s neither here nor there, this ruined republic. Like the body you wear. Like the world that’s been ending for so long but won’t ever stop.

You’ve often thought about ending it, yourself, in that old life. So many times, digging your own grave with misplaced words, you were tempted to lie breathing the soil until its toxins sent you to sleep. Her, her, you mouthed into the dirt. Broken vessel, traitor bones. Should have swallowed the water when you fell into Lake Anza when you were thirteen and drowned. It took you nine years, four months, and seventeen days to climb out from the earth you carved up with your own shame and walk away from the girl buried there.

Now, you survey the moving seam where the water meets the land: blurry and unclear, the waves throw up plastic and choked fish and confusion. Nature never divided things plainly. A terminus is an origin point is a balance in the center of the scale. In this moment on the journey of radioactive decomposition, you understand you have only made it halfway to the person you are. Time stretches ahead of you into the dark, so you settle among the ashes of democracy to wait for dawn. It is a beautiful half-life, you think. All around glitter the shards of what you were, what you are, what you might have been; and from here, they look just like diamonds.

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It Was a Pheromone Party | Val Maloof

You know, a pheromone party? The kind where strangers all wear shirts to bed for three nights in a row, then put it in a bag, label it with their ID number, and then everyone goes around sniffing each bag like a zombie trying to find its prey? You don’t have those here?

You should start them. They’re fun. Make sure to wear cotton, it’s breathable and your stench will last longer in the fabric. Try not to judge the color or what’s on each shirt, don’t read too much into it, it’s all about the smell. 

I know pheromones don’t have a smell, but it’s also about the smell.

No, you don’t touch the shirts, that would tamper with the purity of the experiment. You just sniff. They line up all the shirts like evidence bags and with gloves on and you open each one and try to find your future partner. At first, you might be really eager – Ok that one didn’t smell too bad. But just wait, they get better. I mean they also get worse of course, like repulsive even, but also better. There’s a smell out there that’s just right for you.

Who started this? A friend of a friend. He said he was looking for someone special. He said the apps were so empty and meaningless. How can you really know someone if you don’t know what it smells like to stand next to them? We all laughed and said that people do meet people through the apps. We said, you’re using your eyes to view their photos and then when you meet them you’re hearing their voice and feeling their hug. All these things matter.

But he said smell was his favorite way to know someone. He said after his wife died a few years ago he would wrap himself in the blanket she watched TV in. Every day, even in the summer he’d wrap her blanket around his neck and shoulders, seeing how many times it could go around his body. It was like she was still here. But after a while, the blanket no longer smelled like her. Time wore it off. And he’s now searching for her scent, sticking his face into each bag, hoping for something close. 

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End Game | Laura Brown

We chased them in circles, kicking up clouds of dust – big, cumulus columns of fine red dirt – until, giggling and screaming, we were outside of ourselves, wound up into something like madness, at which point Gran would bang open the screen door and yell at us to cut it out and leave them chickens alone, and when we ignored her, pose the existential question that gradually brought us staggering to a sweaty halt, bent over with hands on our knees, panting and laughing a little more uncertainly, the dust settling, the chickens strutting off, indignant, out of reach, and we would all decide we were tired of the chase and race to another corner of the farm to do something else.

God, the angles of him. Long legs bent at the knees, ninety degrees to the floor; his back an acute line to his thighs when he leans forward, forearms resting on his legs. I am not available for this, but he dissolves me. 

And what do y’all plan to do when you catch one? Gran would yell from the doorway, fists on her hips, and that was the question that eventually stopped us, because the chase was exhilarating, but it had to end one way or another – either we stop, or we succeed – and never having succeeded, I didn’t know what would happen; I didn’t know what I planned to do; sometimes I had a vision of talons and beaks turning on me, tearing at my flesh, rivulets of bright blood dripping down my arms; other times, I had a vision of grabbing its body and finding that it was warmer and softer and more yielding than I ever dreamed, that I couldn’t stop myself from squeezing it hard and harder, crushing it to my chest, possessing it at last, until it goes limp in my arms, and when I let it go, it falls to the earth with a thud. 

God, everything about him. The intensity of his eyes, the stillness of his body except for the energy in his hands, rotating the base of his glass like a pitcher on the mound fingering a ball, studying the strike zone, watching, waiting.  

Maybe what I wanted was to be fast enough to catch the chicken, hands on either side of the wings, ready to clasp, and to freeze that moment in time; then the bird turns and cocks its head to the side to fix its liquid black eye on me, pausing, standing still as I brush the tips of my fingers against its feathers, grazing it just enough to feel the staccato pulse of its heart beating more than five times a second; then I draw back, right myself, and walk away, the bird looking after me, following me for a few steps, perhaps. 

But this is not the kind of thing that happens.  

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