ESSAY
My son opens his mouth to show me a loose tooth, and for a moment I see everything. The countries he will visit that I never will. The languages he will speak that I have already lost. The grandchildren who will not know my name. The whole future, housed in a mouth full of baby teeth.
My son closes his mouth. The tooth is just a tooth, and I am just a father again.
But for a moment, I saw it all.
INSIGHT
He dreamt I was bodybuilder Kay Baxter. A bikinied beauty, yes, but not the figure I would have wanted to represent me at age 10, especially as the new girl in school, Black and visibly other.
WIT TEA
Leaving / the party in a boat / yet arriving on a blimp.
BACK OF THE ENVELOPE
Cringe but free. Honest in delusion & accepted into honest delusion – participants in wonderful, mutual dream.
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The most consistent yet overlooked character of any horror is easily the haunted house.
"What River found most difficult / was to see one minute into the future."
I was trying to think of time not as a linear thing but as a landscape; that these stories, people, and objects are existing on the same plane or landscape at the same time.
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