I sprang from the brackish water between Treasure Island and San Francisco. During the cold swim through the dark, bits of plastic bound together into fins that turned to legs, ripped-bag-gills fused into lungs, and I became.I spent my first night on a marshy bank in the body of a woman with the mind of a newborn. The East Cut
They brought my bed down into the parlour and put it just a little way from the fire. It feels like winter-black meltwater from the cows’ trough running through my veins, though it’s as fine a June as any of the sixteen I’ve been granted. They moved Grandpa’s bed last year, so I knew what was coming.“You’re a calamity, John
“You’re just a glorified waitress.”The California broker took Robin’s wrist. Bloody Mary spilled up her blue sleeve.“Sir,” she said, “I’d like to ask kindly that you put your seatbelt on and respect the captain’s rules. He knows best.”“Are you from Ala-bam-a?”“I’m from the Carolinas.”“Weyull, miss Southern belle, I said it once and I said it twice, but ya still didn’t
Scratchy bass. My father, drenched in moon, in music.I remember him taking out his rusty saxophone from the case.By now, it’s probably in the attic, or already sold. Before, I’d stay up listening. — An amber alcohol-cologne regularly drifted from his room, a combination of reed solution and Lemon Agua de Colonia. The smell has currently been replaced by a
Boss Wilson shook his head, and I felt my soul shaking when he did. I knew grandpa was gonna see us safe off the earth before it died, I never doubted it at all until now, but listening to Boss Wilson I was growing fearful it weren’t gonna work out so good, that grandpa’s sacrifice would all be for nothing, that he’d’ve done us dishonest for the first time in his life and that we was all gonna die here on the skin and bones of the earth.
The man lifted the brim of his wide, black hat to reveal the shiny leather of an eye patch and the shadowed face beneath. The face was young, the skin was smooth. The eye-patch gave it a roguish handsomeness. And then Ambrose blinked, and the face was cracked, the skin sloughing away, the jawbone showing through, the one eye-socket empty and leering.
“My parents are gone,” you say.
“Where are they?” says the small one.
The tall one elbows him.
“They are buried in a graveyard outside Dartford. So, I’m an orphan like Oliver Twist.”
“This is not your home. This will never be your home. This is nobody’s home,” they say.
The boy curls deeper into his sodden sleeping bag and whimpers.
“You must leave,” they hiss, “You must leave and never come back.”
Was I young once or have I always been? Did I spring twisted and unexpected from this parched ground, this frozen, more-rock-than-soil ground, or did the earth form around me?Or did the Earth form around me? Does the sky hang on my high-reaching limbs?I have no memory of youth – so long ago… so many suns and moons and seasons
When I woke my cross was turned wrong side out, silver to the world, gold inward. Must have been some dream I can’t remember, one from the genre of tumult and fire and whipped up clouds. Art can do many things — sit, roll over, speak, piss. Even atone. We prefer shock and awe, of course, which doesn’t make it
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