Fiction

Kroll’s hands lay slack on the table as if he meant to abandon them there. I wondered what an investigating judge was obligated to do about a man like Kroll, and whether, in calling me to this cafe, the judge now shirked her duty or bent to it. 

The cafe was still shuttered against scorching daylight, now dimming. Soon the night markets would open: divining beetles, sea-petroleum, delicate bottles of attar of orange. A skink without a tail darted up the wall. 

“You’re very quiet,” the judge said. “Have I mistaken myself in you?”

Sam Goody was a haven set across from a broken decorative fountain in the dimly lit mall I grew up near, a shop where misfits and bankers, smokers and jocks, single mothers and next-door neighbors found themselves assembled by a shared desire for music. It was a place for discovery, a place where unearthing a musical gem, by force or by accident, could help a youth from a small Southern town carve out an identity. An open mind and some disposable income could lead to a treasure that might alter your life.

The striking, Borgesian death of Wren Cartwright is the forgotten story of East Village lore. Precisely because the neighborhood has experienced seismic tumult, from the crack epidemic to the AIDS crisis to rapid gentrification, it has left few witnesses to such an eccentric lifestyle and its improbable end. Thus separating reality from anecdote is that much more difficult.  

“The universe is full of eyes.”  —Robert Duncan

In summary, the slaughter will be aesthetic, a letter to a future gone viral. An invading army of red octopuses galloping over a velvety yellow hill in California. Swarming hover traffic on Interstate 280 North. Red octopuses climbing the Auto-Tubes, leaping cement barriers with the ease of Olympic hurdlers. Spraying atomized seeds, shrunken and nearly microscopic red fleas ready for replication, small enough to blink through a slit where zipper meets zipper on a suitcase.  

Jason Kelst was a composer who died in obscurity in 1983. He was fifty at the time. He spent his days working behind the counter at an Optimo smoke shop in a small town’s downtown, selling cigars and comic books to the area’s residents. He maintained few ties with the area’s residents. He lived in a small apartment two doors down from the smoke shop and rarely ate out or went to bars. He attended no religious institution, had no romantic connections that anyone knows of, and was in fact the perfect model of a recluse.

They’ve renovated the Gates of Hell since the last time I was here, some four years ago. Now when you come in the front door—the glass broken, replaced with stained, graffiti-covered plywood with a dangling steel pull-ring—there’s a bigger living room than there used to be, full of filthy couches and grubby lay-z-boys broken in the recline position.

Excerpts:

 11/13/2012

Dear Professor,

I just got out of the doctor’s office:

they wanted to scar my face and kill what’s inside me.

I ran out and did not pay.

Jacob A.

12/5/2012

Dear Professor,

Things on the streets have been really crazy. I have been very distracted watching and listening to what is going on, it is somewhat out of my control. But, I miss you and class. I will be in class on Monday.

Thank you,

Bye

Sandra

5/29/2014

“I felt it myself, and made others feel it.”  –Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

First, I’d like to define what I mean by style. Or rather: what style means to me: The expression of an author’s subjective truth within the framework-truth of his time.

Usually an author writes

a) about what interests him. (i.e. about something he likes    hates    fears, etc.)

b)    hopefully    about what he knows.

Odee Bones was an autograph name, a stage tag, a nom de la rue as she often said. Her real name was Odile Bonnard, like the famous painter, but not that family. She was a raven-haired woman, or as Frank imagined her, a Poe-haired woman. She had an Edgar Poe-like personality—morbid, dark, seemingly bred in some remote country you never heard of. And, except for a few absurd tics, she fit quite well in the parade of that depressed poet’s heroines—a Lenore or a Legeia—all the femme fatales of the stewed Romantic imagination.