Fancydelic

Glass There are too many lights hurting my eyes.  Different colors flashing. Want to close them.  Want to sleep. He's saying: ma'am, ma'am, can you hear me?  I need to you tell me what happened.  I need to you to remember and be as detailed as you can.  Someone puts a wool blaket around my shoulders and it's summer time in the desert and I want to scream but my face is numb.  The blanket is scratching at my neck. The lights flash.  Red.  There is a small figure covered by a white sheet.  Blue.  Broken glass shimmers on the road like ice. In

Brian likes to play detective.  He comes homedrunk and late in his gabardine business suits and looks through my drawers while I pretend to be asleep.  Last night he found a letter from an old college boyfriend of mine.  Someone I had lost touch with for years.  In the morning, he throws it down on the table in front of me and says, "you fucking whore." Brian is cheating on me, but he doesn't know that I know, so occassionally he pulls theatrics like these.  He turns the attention to me because he feels guilty for fucking his secretary.  She's twenty-two, has C cup breasts, and a tattoo of a daisy on her right shoulder blade.  She's everythi

She closed the door quietly behind herself as she reentered the apartment.  Part of her wanted to slide along the door and collapse on the concrete flooring, putting her head in her hands.  People often did that in movies when they couldn't deal with the situation outside.  But she restrained herself, and went to sit on the couch instead. There had been a heavy breeze on the roof of the apartment, and it had turned her long black hair into a thousand bird nests.  Her fingers got stuck in it when she tried to get the tangles out.  Wind always made her feel tangled, and when others remarked how invigorating a cool breeze could be on their chee

There was something super human about those people on the side of the road.  It must have been at least one hundred degrees out there in a part of the desert that can't even support most animal life.  We were on a state highway in the midst of the wasteland that is southern New Mexico, one of those perfectly straight line highways that disappears on the horizon into rolling waves of heat.  It really made you think you were heading nowhere.  Even the ranch roads ambled off into the desert with no evidence of civilization at their  end. All of that desolation, and yet, I had never seen so many people walking on the side of a highway.  It was a

Public places felt safe because you always had to hold something back.  It was the only way to talk, you had to keep your head. He was sitting across from her, but he had decided not to be present.  His jaw was strongly set and a defensive flair of anger was in his eyes. "Look, I don't know what you think this is, but I'm sure it doesn't warrant that look on your face," she started.  "We just haven't had a chance to talk, to really talk, in a long while.  I have a lot of things I've been wanting to say."  She paused to give him room to speak, but he stayed silent, giving a little nod: permission for her to continue. "All right," she took a

In dreams I can kiss you, ask what you think of God, where you find beauty, follow the roads that cross your depths. Your hair is like it was, falling raven black just below your eyes. We can touch noses shoulder blades or the tips of our fingers. While I sleep our edges are still soft, and you are always smiling.

A half moon face hangs low over the city pocked and jaundice. The sad period marking the end of the night. You are still with me your face the mask of grotesque tragedy and our speech our dance of pleasantries filling the performance space with emptiness. Would we recognize each other in plain clothes? Out of character? Would our lives match the scripts we've written?

In this war, too, they list the dead in silence. We stare blankly, unfeeling, trying out sympathy and sorrow, but the heart has been beaten out of us— the atrocities of humanity shut us down with guilt, and discouraged, we wave it out of our lives. We spoke out once, and our voices were strangled and left quiet.  

The train car goes underground.  The lights flicker and the roar heightens.  We are thrust into a deafening entropy.  Across the isle a wide-eyed girl bobs her head to each new passenger's footsteps.  Her face is bleached and bony.  She has the eyes of a wild horse. At each stop an automaton comes over the speakers.  "The doors are closing.  Please stand clear of the doors."  I close my eyes to escape the girl's stare and the train rattles on, black and bleak. "The doors are closing.  Please stand clear of the doors."  My eyes are opened by the screams of a baby.  A mother struggles in with two little girls and the baby clasped around her n