Water Flows

Each night water flows beneath our bed. We can hear it. It lulls us to sleep and keeps us there. Unless there is a great storm and the river rises. In which case the opposite happens. The water awakens us and carries us away. Each night water flows beneath our bed.

Bones For Fishes

There was a second person sitting on the boat. The boat was heading right for the gate.

The driver of the boat had no intention of stopping at the gate. The second person had no say in the matter of stopping at the gate. The boat rammed the gate, crashed through.

The train hits the boat, throwing the second person overboard. Boat in splinters. Crap all over. Train continues on. Boat debris spins and bobs and twirls in the train’s wake. Some of the boat sinks. Some stays on the surface, forlorn. The driver of the boat is nowhere to be found. The second person is nowhere to be found. A boat is dispatched. Divers. A helicopter, too. Persons inside looking down, hoping to find the driver and the second person in life vests, clinging to a bit of flotsam, the back of a whale, a friendly dolphin, anything at all. The significant other now on the scene, on shore, waiting. So unlike him. Not to stop. Always such a cautious driver. No points on his license, none at all. Top insurance rating. No surcharge, discounts every year. For as long as I can remember. Must have been something. Heart failure. Stroke. Oh God oh God what a way to go. What a way to go.

The search continues. News vans and news crews arrive, hang around, fix makeup, file stories, lose interest, pack up, go home. Back to the studio or to a scene of the crime.

After two days the search is abandoned. After one day the gate is repaired and flowers and crucifixes and candles of photos of the missing appear on the scene. Fresh flowers. Refreshed every few days for weeks, months, then less often, then never. Flowers die, float away. Photos fade, disintegrate. Bits of boat long gone. Sport divers now sometimes find trinkets on the bottom, wonder where they came from, how long they have been there. Nothing of value, though.

Never found the second person. Never found the driver. Bones for fishes.

after David Markson

Painting is where the rain falls.

Bullets through the roof.

Tank

“Happiness is waking to face the day. A new adventure before you. It is not going to sleep at night, having survived another day. That attitude will never make you happy although it might provide a sense of relief.

“Well if that is what happiness is, what keeps it away.

“Simple: Fear.

G. thought about that. Saw its truth, in his own case, anyway. Well if not its truth, then its plausibility. As a child he preferred to sleep, to dream. Preferred the reality of his dreams to that of the waking world because he knew his nightmares could not hurt him while what happened in the streets could.

“A tank came down my street, he said. I’d rather dream a tank than find one awake.

Archive Feature: Fire

Fire dates from 1989 and is one of the most viewed pages in the archive. It first appeared in The Quarterly.

Fire

The fire was started by a spark
igniting coconut husk
fiber in a cushion maker’s house.

Several people die each year on country roads.
Returning inebriated from taverns,
body heat depleted by alcohol,
they are drawn to warm macadam.
They lie down.
Four out of five drivers stop.
Some are run over more than once.

The fire was started by a spark
igniting coconut husk
fiber in a cushion maker’s house.

They applaud as the hearse drives by.
Victim’s father witnesses the execution,
fulfilling the promise of the day
his son was buried.

The fire was started by a spark
igniting coconut husk
fiber in a cushion maker’s house.

Archbishop orders fiftyfour Templars
burned at the stake
for retracting confessions.
Bearded man stops at the center of the bridge.
He is assigned to the work crews.
He watches two infants and a woman
placed on a grill
over a firey pit.

The fire was started by a spark
igniting coconut husk
fiber in a cushion maker’s house.

First published in The Quarterly
C 1989

Download PDF from bend of bay press

Spider

It was a small nervous spider dependent on his web worried about the sound emanating from the braches overhead. They were too loud to be insects, to be food, but they  grew louder hence were coming closer. He feared for his web, his days work, coming to ruin. As had happened yesterday, and the day before. Both times, the previous times, the ruin had come silently. He had no warning when the object whatever it was sliced across the center of the web, collapsing it into itself taking his home and store of food with it. When was that? Yesterday, or the day before. Both times it had happened, both without warning. But the details of the one other time he could not recall. Just that it had happened. He knew it had happened because he saw the traces, the ruins, the remains of the previous web dangling from the tree just below him.

But this new sound. This new threat. Was it a threat? Can a spider hear? If a spider cannot hear, then what is the sound? A threat. What will happen?

Read more…