New Blue

The radiator struggled like a drunk being beaten in a back street waking Jonathan into the 3 am cold. Once the rattle gave up everything was all the more quiet by contrast. Sleep would not return. He wrapped his head in his pillow and thought of nothing, closed his eyes against the dark that was never dark enough, against the absence that would not yield itself to him, would not open to accept him, into the hours of nothing before dawn.

Seething

The dog ran down the open alleyway to find only that it deadended. The rain collected in deep puddles. He looked around for any exit and found none. The footsteps where coming nearer. Soon they would have him. Despite the downpour he shook himself, turned to face the way he had just come and prepared in the wet for what was coming.

Mint

The standard events happened in order: waking up, wandering through it, alcohol and sleep. Food scattered throughout. A little water, conversation and piss. The rare shit in a public lavatory. All of it added up to a day, week, month. It went on this way. It goes on this way. It will. The sun above us the sun beneath.

Brown

Unscrolling the paper leavings of a drunken evening to discover where he's been. He finds a note on the back of a receipt from the Red Avenger Lounge. It said, "stay by the window display of the nuclear blue cloud... the tall one. You can see it from here."

Not really anything

strange were the songs of the bright light that guided us onto brown planets where faces of those others were glassed and stared an image back at us across the open landscape, some wandering particulates together, saying the same thing, coloiding round your name

Flight

Nothing was said about delayed flights, crap food, the waiting or the alcohol. Instead they sat largely in silence, watching the bubbles rise in jumbo sized Sam Adams, listening the tuneless hum of the thousand nameless. A child wandered away from a mother on a cell phone. It was dressed in duck covered overalls and lifted its knees wildly in the new thrill of two legged. Jonathan watched the kid absentmindedly taking occasional sips from his beer. The mother noticed by the time it had almost reached Jonathan's table, scooping it up a few feet away. As she pulled her baby toward her something changed fundamentally. The air seemed finely clear and he felt as though small particulates, the atomic elements of the world were suddenly exposed... as though one he had one eye to a microscope and the other fixed on the view from an airport bar. This did not startle him. It seemed only natural. But what did startled him was how desperately and how suddenly he wanted a cigarette after so many years. How every part of his body ached for it in a kind of rhythm, in a kind of time.

Paper

He cut his finger on a piece of notebook paper. Flicking his hand away he stared at the clear line as blood clouding into few the spilled on to the surface. Everything counted in the grand scheme of agonies, even the small ones, even the paper cuts.

Windows have Erasers

Jonathan stood outside the cabin and watched the old yellowed window fling oranges against the dark. The rain had stopped and his dog was circling uneasily, about to shit. Mist hovered around him and on the lake it settled down like a meringue. Somewhere a fish clipped the surface of the water and disappeared. The dog found its spot. Above him the sky scattered its blue particulates, spittle exploding from the cough of some ailing god. People still smoke in this world, and the next.

Idiot Money

He deals in the markets of every day misunderstandings, misconceptions, out right stupidity. Say someone should enter the name of a famous website incorrectly, or the last digit of 1-800-SUPPORT as 1-800-SUPPORZ; or say a man walks into a gas station restroom sits down in a stall and is perplexed by the "Jenny Loves Tommy" etched into the door in front of him. Only then does he notice the alien sound of feminine voices. Somewhere these items are written down, added to the ledger, and as is always is the case, somewhere someone gets paid. Danny is that someone.

Not even November

Months were passing now like trees along the highway from a speeding car. Nothing was centered, nothing distinct. When ever he wished he wished for colder, darker, shutdown all of day. Make the colloidal galaxies burn themselves out starless on the evening's plane.

Listening to Orange

A long orange, metal ribbed tube dangled from the 10 floor of the parking lot halfway down to the street. It waved with the wind. No one noticed, not even michael as he pulled his dark blue 3 series into the garage and waited for the ticket to click toward him, then wound his way up cursing the SUVs and idiots who left adjacent spaces unusable until on the thirteenth floor he finally slid between an Escalade and a Jetta. He caught his door just before it collided into the Cadilac and held his breath to squeeze out. No fucking point in any of this. Some where at the far end of the lot something sparkled brightly like sunlight on a watch face. Michael squinted toward it just as it vanished. Footsteps wandered casually away unseen. He checked the time. Late for the day but early for the meeting. Two stories beneath him the orange throat gasped a long gulp of air and went slack against the wall. Something in Michael clicked and he got back into his car, unwound the 13 floors, paid $5.25 for 8 minutes of parking to an elderly asian man, drove 12.6 miles to his apartment, walked up 3 sets of stairs, opened the door, went to the bedroom, picked up his alarm clock. The red lines glowed 9:38. He smashed it on the stained concrete floor. There was another reason he was here. There was something else he was looking for... something in the closet, above the clothes. The cold weight of it now in his hands, this thing he came home to find.

Sunday Men

The day spread out in all directions. It had no end. The waking dawn had given way to a ceaselessness of bright pricing sun. White, miles of white, a son's lifetime of it and a fathers'. Where every they went a kind of blindness seemed to follow. Both of them knew this, even spoke of it from time to time. Still it made no difference. And day after day they emerged from their dark houses onto the pearl blinking fields of praise.

Leader board

The same solution each day:  line them up, lead them out into the bright courtyard, stand them up against the wall... examine each of them closely, try to find a difference. But it never seems to lead to anything. They stare back happily, vacantly. They never say a word. There isn't a word to say. They can't say a word. That's why they are here. That is why they are examined... why you examine them. This one's eyes are gray, but so are all of them. You think this gray is darker, more defined, but it could just be a play of the light. Soon it will not matter. Soon no one will even think of them, huddle together out in an abandoned school at the edge of town. They will be entirely forgotten if they haven't been already. And one day you will disappear as well and no one will be left to lead them back again from the courtyard and through the winter garden.

some other

In the center of the room. In the absolute center of the room. He sits. There is a place to the side of him where a sharp square of light has rested. New afternoon sun on the wood and white. Wonder at it all. The plainness of lines intersecting. The abstract corners the sheltering box. Pastures lie there on the blond floor and wait. The landing figure of the meadow ponders his unaccustomed brow.

Some words

Things remain generally how they should for Ran Thistle. His daughters continue their somewhat steady growth toward the sun and away from the dirt, this wife plumbs and diets, plumbs and diets, and his job pays for all of them, all of them together. So he doesn't end up worrying that much. His sleep ranges from six to nine hours a night. The years settle into their groove and loose themselves in the steady rhythm. So it does come as a bit of a shock to Ran to wake up and find himself naked on a strange bathroom floor. If it is a bathroom. Yes a toilet. Yes a bathroom. So it is odd to him to find himself half naked, down to his boxers really, on the cold tiled floor of a white bathroom beneath Florissant rectangles. He rights himself and starts to unswirl into consciousness. Something is seeping under the door. Two half skinned finger pulse toward him. Ran, someone whispers, Ran? Can you hear me? Ran? 

The furthest City Light

A large bug flew past his ear and collided, recoiled, re-collided with the stinging blue street light above the intersection. Jeremy was drunk for the first time in weeks and flicked his ear and shook himself free of the imaginary bugs that remained with him. Nothing spoke in the blooming artificial simmer around him. No footsteps feel. He had out walked them all. Still the lights remained. Each city perimeter spilled into another. The next as empty as the last. Hours no longer mattered. He listened to himself think.

Short for Abbreviation

Not that she could remember what it was that her body had been doing while she slept. It's just that it would be nice if she could, you know, remember if her arm had flailed around like a fish as she ran from the ravenous coke machine in the school cafeteria. Had she tried to cover her self during the naked in public places dreams? Had she kicked her legs desperately trying to catch that bus already too late for class though the quicksand mile of a strangely familiar unfamiliar door to the edge of the street and the very slowly departing bus? Had she gasped for breath in the face of the perusing shark? Had anything moved? Or had she just laid there, while inside everything flickered, and jumped, ran and screamed? Had she been still? Did that mean anything? About her? About the bed? About anything else or anyone?

Will Wonders Never Cease

She made a beeline for the northwest exit of the train station. Nothing seemed appropriate. The face of people were overly who they were. Like a sudo documentary on how people look in train stations. Not a real documentary, you know. But more of an actually scripted film made to appear like it was a documentary on what people look like in train stations. Like that exactly. This is what she thought as she pass a little girl picking up a cigaret butt and drop it again over and over. Passing the time until the father was done buying a coffee. The sun lit the station through a half oval illumination of the white streets outside. Too bright, she thought. The girl was still playing with the butt when she glanced back. she felt the overwhelming urge to stop her, to slap the filth from her hands. The little girl appeared to repeat the sequence of where she would drop it. Moving counter clockwise between her deliberate locations until she reach the last and the loop would repeat. Across, at the far opposite end a massive woman sat with an old basset hound in far fewer cloths than Julia, or anyone, would have found acceptable. Yet she still seemed hot in the climate controlled bubble. Fanning herself with a copy of In Shape. It never seems to end.