Vol XLVII, Frequently Asked Questions

THE SLOW AWAKENING

1
Officers speak in hushed tones of the distressing event. What looked like a cargo of harem girls wasn’t. On the other side of the empty city, a Jesus impersonator goes to bed still wearing his socks. Everyone else has forgotten why the flags are flying at half-mast.

2
The highways running west have all turned back. I eavesdrop on the children drawn by the fire trucks. Someone is always selling someone out. In a small, white room, I find a heart hooked to a monitor. I rehearsed what I was going to say, but never say it.

3
What colors do you see when you close your eyes? I see the purple tongue of a man hanged as a traitor. Grandfathers would desert their families if they could manage stairs. Just before light, the waking birds acknowledge these cruel and often difficult facts.

BINGE

The only thing I taught him, the old man said, was how to drink a fifth a day. Miners who had died in childhood walked into the bar after finishing digging their graves. I got up frequently to look out the window. Each time I returned, a woman with your red-gold hair was analyzing the long silences as if they were dreams.

TRIPTYCH

1
It’s really all about light, you said. An empty boat floated down the slow, black river. Only moments before, we had entered a video store no one goes to anymore.

2
Police threw a cordon around the building. The sun hesitated. You lay down in the hall, hastily fitting yourself into the chalk outline of the victim’s body.

3
The sun had set, a disheveled orphan missing some teeth, the faint smell of shit on his hands, and in an inside pocket the varnished beads from a broken rosary.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why call it fog on the lake? Why not honeybee venom? Everything fit in the U-Haul trailer – flags of all nations, troubled queen, tattoos of smiling demons and stalking tigers. With the discovery, the babysitter had begun to drink heavily again. And such wind! A sword waving in glittering circles above our heads.

SPERMICIDAL

I ask if you remember the story headlined FIRE. You slowly circle the parking lot again, searching for a close-in spot. We’re the ghosts of our own thoughts – or no, a character in each other’s stories. At the track your horse stumbles. Potential orphans pass us on the stairs. We’re far from the ocean. I watch a bird that looks like the bird that picks the crocodile’s teeth.

CANNIBALS & MISSIONARIES

A man sits alone in a room, staring at the fire like Descartes, broken glass in his beard. There are things for which he doesn’t know the reasons. He throws his arms around a horse’s neck on a street in Turin and bursts into tears. Someone slits someone’s throat. And where did the bullet come from? Death is just like a pink eraser, only more so.

RIDDLES

1
Mix a little gunpowder with saliva. Memory is a building, a fountain, a madman who becomes calm on seeing a sheep. In floats an empty word balloon. It shimmers like the ashes of some extinct halo.

2
You dread the cough of a stranger. Agents sent to investigate force the prisoner to kneel. The hand that stops moving still holds a pen. Your ancestors saw so many witches they ran out of stakes to burn them all. I wipe my eyes; I was once a fan of riddles myself. Tiny flying things with grinning monster faces continue their dance.

3
Fireworks in my chest, and there’s a fresh dusting of snow, a white hare without fur or bones.

GHOST TRAIN

1
Everyone else is gone. I’m watching a movie by myself. You can’t doubt the existence of hell, the fat old priest says. You live in it.

2
I’m talking soothingly to a starving dog. There are no people on the street, but if there were, they would avoid my eyes. On the hill above town, halos encircle the searchlights.

3
Run, you yelled, run. Others chose suicide. The only dreams I seem to remember are the nightmares. Barbed wire and concrete, shaded in the summer by young maples.

4
The hit man feels around under the bed. His fingers come away covered with blood. He looks up at the fat priest. I don’t think God is interested in me, he says.

5
It’s been a lifetime of evictions and surplus Kalashnikovs. The train could leave at any moment. No one I ask knows where it’s going. She has one foot on the platform, one foot in the air.

PURSUED

1
She’s afraid she’s being followed. You yourself frequently look back over your shoulder. There’s nothing there – brown trees, some shredded clouds. From now on, you’re going to define love loosely. A bird whistles like a bullet from a high-powered rifle.

2
Bird tracks cover the sky. My rifle jams at a critical moment. The last free Indians on the Plains nibble the grass. One of them, when I look again, is crunching bones. The women pee standing up, the men sitting down.

3
Strong winds visit in the evening. Just the same as yesterday, time insults the brain. The dying light renders faces conveniently indistinct. I hide behind a bush. Everyone who has a lucky number has forgotten what it is. Hats sail down the street. After dark, the piano player plays on only the black keys.

WELCOME TO HARD TIMES

1
He was still a long way away when he limped into view. Maybe the airport was fogged in, maybe the disease was contagious. He rolled his suitcase over the railroad tracks, bumpity bump, drenched in the coldness of passing headlights. It was a little past midnight, an hour I once knew well. A woman with her throat slashed stepped out of the doorway and boldly offered the garish wound for him to kiss.

2
I had a job as a guard in the local museum of antiquities. On most days, the visitors were few, but serious. It may have been mistake for the captain to order an extra tot of grog for his men. Sailors from the ship eyed the red fire axe on the wall. I am ashamed of mankind was all one said.

3
What strange weather we were having. The only light came from the flashes of electrical activity associated with panic attacks. I tried to sleep, but a so-called colleague phoned with a question. You OK? she asked. I pretended I didn’t understand. It began to snow where the general stuck a round-headed pin in the map.

AN ARMED MAN LURKS IN AMBUSH

1
Ladies wave their handkerchiefs in greeting, men lift their hats. The passing flock of crows spreads a bewilderment of shadows. Police disguised as woodcutters and Lithuanian tailors watch from behind lampposts. Each day brings less daylight, but also lessons in how to hull seeds. I look up at colossal windows arched like tombstones. All along and without claiming it, I’ve had a seat on the wagon that carries my coffin.

2
Oh, to be old and stoop-shouldered and walking through streets that aren’t there, pastel birds from discount pet stores rioting like exasperated horns and rattles and a statue of the dictator ducking into a doorway in a shapeless cape of melting snow.

3
I borrowed my broken yellow teeth from diseased longings. Icky, the child said. Even thieves had lost faith in the face value of paper money. Despite the film of dust on everything, winter retained some of the glitter of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. An old lady leaning a ladder against the side of her house was the only one in the village to escape. What next? Contact me with suggestions.

THREATENING WEATHER

Precision instruments. Camouflage prints. A necklace of raindrops. What a world it is! An army of shadows occupies the capitals of Europe. Ghosts drift up from smokestacks. Night comes earlier than usual, faces a disturbing shade of orange. But only later, when the teenage hostess at the Greek diner smiles at us to follow, does it occur to me to wonder whether mirrors retain a memory of every person they ever knew.