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Fiction and Drama

Little Miss Bigmouth

Little Miss Bigmouth

Summer has always been problematic for me.

When she’s in a state of panic, my mother bargains with the Lord and imposes fioretti on herself: no eating sweets, no going to the movies, no reading magazines, no listening to Rai Radio 3, for weeks, months, years. These days she can’t go to the hairdresser’s or watch TV. Sometimes the combination is no Radio 3 and no sweets. Or no coffee and no new shoes. She mixes them, matches them — it depends.

The Ellipse Maker

The Ellipse Maker

There was an asymmetry, but he couldn’t find it

It was disappointing that these devices didn’t operate on different principles. The sameness suggested that the mystery in them was limited, that the idea behind them was a known form that Jacob hadn’t encountered before only because he didn’t know very much about the world.

Ace

Ace

Tonight was SmackDown!

We transformed the living room into an arena. Hauled the coffee table from the center of the room and carried it into the dining room. Removed objects that could cause a freak accident — a statue sitting on a low mantle that my parents picked up on their honeymoon, the fireplace poker we never used. We took the cushions and pillows from the couch and spread them across the floor, covered sharp edges with throw blankets and with my bedroom comforter.

Area of Isolation

Area of Isolation

Stand over the toilet. Sway

So much of life is spent not having sex. Put the kitchen in order, clean the bathroom, print the report, return the call, keep the dental appointment, get the car out of the shop. But this isn’t about us at all: it’s about some deal. So let it happen, see what it really is. Watch the ball go up, up over the formalized landscape, lost in bright overcast.

Dying but It’s Something Else

Dying but It’s Something Else

I say, Dad, quite honestly, fuck the snowplow

And in the moment of me and my father, I see myself, I see my face in a tiny square in the corner of my phone and I’m flushed, I’m this red angry thumbprint listening and trying to think things through and waiting for it to all be over, and he’s in his bed holding the tablet or whatever they gave him at this terrible angle where I just get the underside of his chin and his hair splayed out on either side, it’s like the underside of his chin is a tiny featureless face jutting up out of the hospital gown, some weird eyeless monster, and all I’m hearing is wheeze wheeze crackle crackle. 

In Thrall

In Thrall

How can we get closer to the wounded belly of the world?

Choose your own birth adventure: either you come out of a dark vagina or an iridescent anus. Taking over for Spinoza, the receding figure who is always with us, Kafka laughs at the childishness of a second creation story. In his work, the animal speaks while the human is, ultimately, struck dumb by anal bureaucracies of his own making. Legal fictions estrange humans from each other and create, in the most sensitive souls, fissures that never heal.