Category: Fiction

In this spiraling boulder we call a planet, there are certain times and places that intersect to create a situation in which every single person involved is absolutely miserable. Every instance of news, airport terminals, certainly, or hospital waiting rooms would apply. I recall the last day of fourth grade; there wasn’t a soul in those chipped yellow walls that actually desired to be there. Well a week ago I was fortunate enough to fall into one of those fissures in time and space: Tuesday morning, the bus stop on the corner where, to the left, the stoplight is spitefully ignorant of pedestrians, and when, as was the case this special day, the bus is late, an overlap of people will converge under the insipid daylight.

“I have not spoken rudely to any child below the age of six while intoxicated with stolen beverages.” No, I’d been completely clear of mind when I’d told that child to jump into its mother’s grave and never return. The beverage I’d held was not stolen, nor had it intoxicated me, but the amber cloak that had flowed from my shoulders had not been in my possession, nor that of a vendor, a couple days prior. Despite this, my assertion was truthful, and there were only forty-one of them left for me to surmise.

My toes curl at the edge of a towering cliff as I gaze at the beautiful scene around me; ancient stone pillars stand as all that’s left between me and the crackling orange lava below. It sizzles and pops, and I scowl at it.

The focused hum of the factory worker tapers off at the confusion. His fingers twitch, long dirty nails scraping against his jeans briefly as he fights the temptation to take his tattered copy of the book out of his inner jacket pocket to check. It would be quick, he reasons as he checks items off his clipboard, the marks barely inside their designated boxes. Into those wrinkled pages, that messy sea of nonsense, then straight back out. The appeal grows gradually as he runs through the words again, skipping over the ones that had been blotched out by his breakfast mishap. Poetry’s adaptable, right?