Week # 35 – Loose connections

Tassel by Coleen Shin

Fog by Susan Tepper  My head’s been wired for sound. I told the docs not to do this. I said I don’t want to hear ANYTHING. They said you have to. You cannot go around with your head in a fog. I like the fog I said. I like the color and texture. I like that you can’t see two feet ahead in really good fog. I like how it conjures up the living and the dead. I like to walk the mountain road in fog. It’s a low mountain, but all the same.

THE POWER by Marcus Speh  Walking down a dead end alley, a woman talks unkindly to her man. He looks hurt. The man thinks: Women! They think they have power over us because they have our children. – The kid between them keeps its eyes closed. It is, in this very moment, deciding if it should be a boy or a girl. Instinctively, the man shows his muscles. His wife’s eyes widen and she stops talking. The thought of sex grows between them like a desert flower out of dead soil when it rains. The kid suddenly screams: she is going to be a girl! The parents rejoice: a girl! The woman thinks: Men! They think they have power over us with their magical dicks. All three look at each other now. And listen.

Matcht by Stephen Hastings-King  I want someone who is attractive and funny, who is kind and who gets me. I want to curl up by a fire with a glass of wine/cup of coffee/dram of scotch and be mesmerized/lose myself. I want someone to go to parties with, someone who speaks the same private language; a look from across the room and we would flee the scene and go make out in the car. I want to share this beginning of a new beginning/chapter/adventure. I want to trust you. Please do not hurt me. I am well adjusted. I do not have baggage. I want to be swept off my feet. I know. I know. I read too many romance novels when I was young and while I no longer believe traces of that reader linger still and here, in this vast electronic space landscaped with billboards that lonely people make about themselves from kits, I feel free to tell you about the ways in which she lingers, you who are packets of 1s and 0s that shower through my image and bounce away. Like the Lady Miss Kier, I believe in the power of love. I believe. I have a lust for life. I want a photograph.

Anemone by Guy Yasko  She’s ripped the elastic from all her waistbands. The loose threads wave like anemones. I am paralysed. My eyes are too heavy to roll, my arms too heavy to move. I cannot lift my head. Miriam wants to argue. Worlds within worlds she says. Maybe. Like the paisley in paisley on her pyjama bottoms. She holds her pyjamas with one hand as she changes the dog’s water. The water sloshes. Her pyjamas fall. I see the muscles moving under her skin. I shut my eyes.

Resolution by John Riley  Too often, Calvin’s willful head finds its way into his hands. He certainly does not want to feel his fingertips brush against his thinning patch of uncombed hair, but is seduced by the way the bulge of his forehead, the bony ridge that slightly protrudes from beneath the hairline, settles neatly into the cup of his palms. It is a comfortable fit, without need of a finger adjustment, although, if his shirt sleeves are the tiniest bit too short, his eyebrows, which are aggressively bushy, tickle his wrists. This slightly diminishes the consolation. A more critical problem the resting of his forehead in his palms gives rise to is that the ears are neglected. It is quite noticeable to Calvin, who lives alone in a house his aunt willed him, that within seconds of his forehead touching his palms his ears turn from pink to a flustered red with what he assumes is lonely frustration. The problem has not yet risen to a fever pitch, but one can never be too careful where the head is concerned. It is an apparently intractable problem, and any chance of resolving it escapes him. His only choice is to struggle to keep his head out of his hands, and he plans to grow more committed to the effort moving forward.

Hector’s Car by Melissa McEwen  Covington Street is a narrow street; it has no yellow line on its pavement and Hector (who lives at the end of Covington) speeds down it as though he is fleeing the cops. His station wagon makes so much noise and is so wide it takes up half the road. Although it rattles like he’s got lots of loose parts in the trunk, Hector drives it like a race-car. It sounds as if it will fall apart as soon as it rounds the corner. And even though he fusses with his car all day on Sundays, it never sounds any better. Covington Streeters shake their heads and say, “Now, why doesn’t that boy just get his car fixed?” Others say, “Or sell it.” But they don’t mean it. Hector’s station wagon is part of the community like a long-time resident. In summer, he blasts his music loud and no one complains or calls the cops; they open their windows and dance. And in the early early-morning, when he goes to do whatever it is he does, Hector’s noisy car is to the folks on Covington Street what roosters are to the folks in the country. And they yawn and stretch without even looking at the clock

Back to Wk #34 – Floating away Forward to Wk #36 – Animal behavior

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