Issue Forty

I get a dog to replace you, but then I name him Pluto. He circles the same spot on the floor over and over again, glaring at me, a planet in constant furious orbit.

“How did you hear about this position?” Idle gossip on the assembly line. Birdsong. The scent of April rain. A neon breeze of raspberry Nerds and smoker’s cough.

From the corner of his eye, the village notice board looked like a guillotine. He turned, squinting. The cataracts had introduced halos around lights and muted colours, but never this.

Wasn’t nowhere else for cover when the sirens went off. Janie had just hopped the fence with a hoagie bag and two Cokes, and I put the mower in park, admiring my work around the gravestone jigsaw.

The mirror wala sold mirrors a few metres from my mother’s fruit stall. My mother told me to stay away from him, but one day, when she was busy with a customer, I walked to his stall, Amir’s Mirrors, and began browsing his wares.

Death wore a top hat at the fancy dress party and there were multicolored streamers crisscrossing the room. I kept on getting tangled in them like a fly in a web.

I kidnapped Stagger Lee, Marla-Jean’s beloved rooster, the one she doted on like it was her last chance for love, and stuck him in my parents’ spare bedroom, where my dad kept his crap katanas, and where my dog, Big Henry, stayed.

My friend Shadow’s wife Wanda was cooking dinner, and it was a disaster and she was narrating the whole time.

Buckets of purple tickseed hang around an entrance to the coffee shop down by the corner of Franklin and Main. Sometimes it hurts to look at them.

The air isn’t safe to breathe today because of the smoke from the wildfires up north.

Nameofcoffeeshop123! Hearing his name, he reached for the cup. Then a voice: I think that one’s mine, she said.

The week we learn our father is dying, we bring our elephants to the ward. No metaphors or flowers, says the nurse.

A few months back I start getting all these spam texts calling me Jonathan:

Hey Jonathan … Yo Jonathan … How’s it going, Jonathan …

Which is really gaslight’y for a few reasons:

1. because Jonathan’s my dead brother’s name.

The blue cots in my kindergarten class appeared while we ate lunch each day.  For me a thermos of milk and a bologna sandwich. 

Mari’s seventeen weeks past her due date. They say it happens with your first sometimes.

will be written on my tombstone, but I bought the ribeye anyways, wrapped in paper not plastic just like dad used to.

Dear Guardians*,

I am writing this letter to inform you that we have several students within the class who have severe, life-threatening allergies to nuts.

It is bright blue and startling and it does not flinch no matter what it sees.