Howie Good is the author most recently of What It Is and How to Use It from Grey Book Press and Spooky Action at a Distance from Analog Submission Press. He co-edits the journals Unbroken and UnLost.
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1 Depressed on Sundays
The
road is barely a road at all, more a dirt track, but the man seems resigned to
his plodding pace. No one would ever mistake him for someone’s darling. He
wears a borrowed coat that’s too thin for the weather, his own coat having disappeared
into the files of the bureaucracy. As he walks, he thinks about the bad times
and thinks about them and thinks about them. Ahead of him looms a forest –
beautiful if it weren’t for the casual desecrations by day trippers. The
treetops sway, an invitation to dance. No,
he replies, I don’t want to.
2 Elegy
I’m
regularly being interrupted – called to the phone, sent out on a diaper run,
shot with water from a garden hose, accosted by street people. It’s been that
way since you went in for routine surgery and never came out. And yet despite
the fog and biting flies, despite the police officers who like to use their
nightsticks, September is still summer, and there’s nothing wrong with that, just
someplace that’s got a pool table and a jukebox, where old bandits and pirates
carouse until closing and a one-eyed yellow cat curled up asleep in the corner
keeps indifferent watch.
3 Why, Why, Why
The
gulls flutter in the wind like white scraps of paper. I don’t care if it’s
sacrilegious. Go ahead and put grad school online and Port-a-Potties on the
hallowed ground of a Civil War battlefield. It’s just that there are things no
one is able to convincingly explain. Why our skin is populated by invisible organisms. Why
the cops searched for your child among the dead and injured and never saw her.
Why we listen with such delight to music by a composer who committed suicide.
Why government helicopters hover over the city. Why labels must say, “May cause
drowsiness.”
4 Life, a Very Short Story
You
talk to family photos, suffer from migraines, play Chopin with unshowy facility
on the parlor piano. Strangers often comment on your eyes – gull’s eyes,
someone called them. The sea heaves just outside your door, and from the back
window, you can see the cemetery where your father is buried. Weeds have
sprouted up overnight among the headstones. You aren’t interested in stories of
success, only failure. “Sunshine,” you say, “is an overrated virtue.” The words
echo. There’s a feeling that something terrible is about to happen. You watch
for a while and then shrug. Maybe because it’s all disappearing.
I
live in an apartment that occupies half the second floor of a faded Victorian
house. The previous tenant took off his clothes and walked off into the
distance. As much as it’s great to say, “We’re going to the moon,” there’s
someone who actually has to get on that rocket and get blown up, maybe. I
always try to avoid raising my voice in response to something that just
happened, but people are hurrying indoors to escape the wind and the sky has
acquired an ominous greenish tint, as if God, in a temper, were offering us his
back.
Your
old sick heart is powering down, becoming hesitant and vague,
indistinguishable. So you board a train with the idea of appearing that night
as a significant figure in another person’s dream. The trip seems to take
longer every time you make it. When you finally arrive, ballet dancers rise on
their toes. You don’t stop to admire their athleticism. The situation that
awaits you across town doesn’t allow for it. You flag a taxi, climb in the
back, state an address. The taxi lurches into motion. By now it’s dusk, and the
dead petals of the world are falling.
I
was woken by hammering from the apartment below mine, maybe muscly henchmen
nailing parts of my skanky neighbor to the floor. If so, he won’t be going
anywhere for a while, not even down the street to get beer and cigarettes. I’m
not like him. I shower every day. I
know jujitsu. I see things out of the corner of my eye – a man walking into
Waffle House at 3 a.m. naked from the waist down; a baby with a swastika
tattooed on his forehead. It’s good to have a record in case any of this goes
to court.
Sleep
has vanished. A low pulsing fear holds our eyes open in the dark. Any moment now, a gun nut in body armor
might step through a door carrying an assault rifle and start killing. I’m no theologist, or any other kind of
-ologist, but if there’s a
god, well, he doesn’t seem to care all that much about the future of his
creation. Just today, as I got off at my stop, the stench from the exhaust
fumes and spilled garbage simmering in the heat was enough to make one think
that hell must be located around here somewhere.