Look out your window. You must admit, it’s a beautiful day.
See them? Way over there. Past that pair of trysting haikus and the crowd of obese novels all screaming for Dostoevsky to come out and play.
Just keep going. Over Alphabet Hill. Let your eyes wander deep into the Forest of Words.
Now, look closely. You see them?
Those aren’t deer you’re seeing. Those are real stories out in the wild.
– Robert Paul Moreira
– As a young boy, Odilon Viellot believed that the inside of his body looked very much like a circus. It was this old memory of a supposition that Odilon shared in bed with his wife, Veronica. In the hollow of his skull, he said, a small clown car orbited his consciousness; in his arms, tiny painted elephants marched back and forth over the hill of his elbow; in his chest, acrobats performed dangerous leaps over the net of his intestines. Skin was merely a circus tent, and his heart, a sort of ringmaster. — John Zackel in Zahir
– He hates Ikea and counts light bulbs with his fingers as each guy take him on. He counts the entire contents of the solar system in his head–Jupiter, Hubble, Kazakhstan. He is not religious but he says the Hail Mary to pass the time and just in case he meets her one day. He wants to live again. — Neil De La Flor in wtf pwm
– Perhaps he had gotten fed up that time. Fed up is an odd way to describe a kid, six or seven years old, but he’s always been sort of strange, popping with anger at some perceived slight, some injustice, some small inconvenience or a bit of stupidity; he’s still like that. You’d expect an angry child to scream and cry facing down some wrong, and I assure you, he usually did, but not this day. Perhaps that’s why the reaction to him was such as it was. He’s the youngest and I often look for that to explain him and that day, but it doesn’t. He sat next to his oldest brother and across from me. I often visited my cousins and ate dinner with them—my parents being wrecked as they were during that time. — Rion Amilcar Scott in Toasted Cheese
– It was nine in the morning and they were clustered near the stinking stacks of Rubbermaid trash barrels, sorting their refundables and milling about. I walked past with my hat low and put the bags down to separate. A vile liquid leaked through the cracks as I kicked and yanked. I dumped my items and awaited profit. I watched. — Joel Van Noord in Thieves Jargon
– Now I’m back here in the Delta having my fun and folly with the old fool, Charlie, and I called him a name just to bend his bones a bit but he got raw about it, pointed that fret-pressin’ knife at me—a simple threat from a simple man—and spoke out strong and stout and challenged me to run the guitar, ring notes from its neck, and I laughed and did a double-take, couldn’t hardly believe my ears let alone my eyes but my sight’s been bad since the day I’s born—reckon why I couldn’t recognize that white man for what he was, him standing there at the crossroads, the horizon moon made him a shade like a beast in black clothes, and he got me to hit the road and head out west to San Antonio, where I stood in a studio facing peeling wallpaper and singing so soft they had me record each tune twice and I put my soul in them songs too and he sold them by the thousands ’til they turned to tiny coffins holding dead tracks and when I’d play some roadhouse show people’d beg I do exact as on that wax, you know, like I’s a jukebox built just for they pleasing, but to me that’s like being in prison and I am dead-set against repeating myself like that damn clock ticking on the grade school wall above the picture of a lynched god, white as white cotton ever got, where I spent my days studyin’ how to jump a freight, didn’t wait to get put behind no mule, hoeing up a row just to plod on back, so I quit that school and I quit this land and hobo-ed a train north to Chicago, where I slept in cemeteries and sat on tombstones playing long enough that my fingers grew calluses so leather-thick I could grab a coal out the fire and light my cig before I’d even begin to feel its warmth and though I’m alive and quick I keep feeling the eerie notion that my life’s passing before my ears and eyes: so if I’m hell bound, Mama, I’m ready to go; let the devil’s hounds howl for me through the night. — Michael Garriga in storySouth
