Category: Story

This guy works in a store. He has a bulging gut but his heart was in the right place.

And off we set with the black bag in the trunk of the car. The drive to the restaurant is some two hundred miles of desert, mountain passes.

I was wrong. It did change. How can you hear the cries of others and not listen?

I get flashbacks of war. But I wasn’t there

Now see what you think about this: a man up along a road stood next to a tan colored car.

Letters. The writing on the brown envelope said: photocopies as requested.

As I mentioned, this isn’t my natural line of work. I just fell into it.

Every now and then the old man would rock back on his heels. Every now and then.

You must listen intently to the sound in your ears. It’s a carrier signal.

March the seventeenth. Thinking about the body guard: got shot.

I spent two weeks in the hospital. I can remember getting there.

There’s a spider crawling on the counter.

I awake with a start, and then slip back to this time.

I stab the cherry tomato with my fork; trying hard to not let it shoot off the plate or squirt seeds at me.

People get killed. Are hollow. They come up to me like clear outlines with no insides, no complexity.

The dirt falls from the shovel all too slowly. I swear it doesn’t want to cover her body: it keeps slipping off to the edges.

People talking in the hotel bar. A couple maybe mid-sixties.

I wait here every day for somebody to come in.

And after the bar? What happened after the bar, he asked.

We stop at the next bench, only a few yards away and she sits gently.

On the edge of a main highway that runs through a small desert town.

This acts as some kind of nominal starting point. Because it was.

It’s a bit embarrassing. I’m worried about stretch marks on my back.

Maybe in the future she’d embody the pure-feminine-ideal or something, but right now Suraj had to explain just who Judy was and why she killed herself…

When I remember Sue Castigliano, I think of almost naked dancers vaulting above the gold-tipped horns of Cretan bulls, to the sound of waves breaking in the distance. Wandering with the ghosts of an exploded island empire, I enter the doors of a library that I first thought was an octopus. When I think of her, I see wheat bound in sheaves…

“It is said that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. Luckily, the teacher may also choose to appear when the student is not at all ready. She drags him, if need be kicking and screaming, into a new, more direct, but also more paradoxical relationship with the self…”

Are we meant to have certain experiences, or to connect with certain people rather than with others? The more romantic among us are used to thinking that there may be one true soul-mate for each person. It is less common to imagine that friends or teachers may also play their parts in this apparent drama of predestination.

I’m lost in space. Lost. As it turns out the poets were right, you can’t go back home again. The Venezuela that raised me doesn’t exist anymore, that much everybody knows, but the situation got so unendurable that I’m finally aware of my limits. As it turns out I’m not an indestructible machine but a leaf floating in the wind, directionless and at the mercy of the gods.

Meet Sidney (aka the Sacred Scribe)—a PhD candidate in Physics with a problem in the paradoxical human realm of love. What does a love triangle look like in the fourth dimension? Quantum indeterminacy rules, as Sidney and her friends explore a bold new cosmology uniting Science and Spirituality, and Sidney’s “wave function” must decide between the primal magnetism of Bruno, her friendship with Alyzia, and the life of her mind and creative soul.

Did I dream it all? I guess I did. But then I see the card on the table. I pick it up. It feels real. TAKE THE ELEVATOR, it says. Did I?