I drove around and got to your house accidentally. So I sat there with the windows rolled down for the cold night and I looked at your windows, and they were dark. I turned the radio on, I smoked a cigarette, but I was uneasy. I changed the stations, I rolled another cigarette. I put the seat down and I thought perhaps I’ll stay there for the night, and I almost lulled myself down with a thought of how, three years ago, I waited down here on the nearby bench, drinking one of six beers I had in a bag I got from the all-night store, sitting across the street from you like I am now, looking at your windows as I do now, watching your silhouette as you were pacing the room, phone to your ear, trying to get hold of your shrink who was in another country. You told me to get out and I said no, this won’t fly with me, it may have worked with other men but not with me, woman, and you went into a panic attack, and you were pacing, and you were crying, and I was standing there and there was nothing I could do.

So I took my keys and I waited outside and I was looking up the number for your shrink when she’s abroad with my phone on a neighbor’s wi-fi, and I texted it to you and I watched as you talked and I saw how your pacing eased and calmed as you did. And then I drunk the second beer, the third, the fifth, the last.

I thought of that night and it was a familiar country in my head, and maybe if the cold was less biting just then, it would have been enough, but I was still uneasy, and I got out of the car and I jumped up and down a little, trying to keep quiet and looking at your window. But that didn’t work, and so I got up to your place and broke in, quietly, and sat like a thief in my armchair in your dark living room.

I sat there, staring, betrayed, at your new drapes, twitching my legs and wanting to smoke. I took off my shoes, taking care to leave them by the chair in an orderly fashion, and I went to your bedroom door and I almost sighed out loud with relief when I saw you were sleeping alone. I don’t know what I would have done that night if I saw you there with somebody. I sat there on the bed next to you, watching you breathe, and breathing with you, and then I lay down, and then I curled into a ball and watched you like this all night, matching a breath for a breath. And when the sun came up sufficiently I got up gently and closed your bedroom door and I made you breakfast. Quietly as I could, and nothing too fancy so the smells won’t wake you. One piece of bread, very lightly toasted, one piece of bread toasted almost black, with the edges cut off, on the edges of the plate, and a simple salad — lettuce I ripped by hand because I couldn’t find the knife, and some cheese — tried to arrange them all nicely on the plate, and I put my shoes on and I closed the door behind me. I often think of it, and about many things like that, and of what you might be thinking to yourself as you’re eating those breakfasts.

They were jumping out of every window when the fire got bad, high story windows too. I’m almost sure I see them through thick billows of smoke. Others were climbing down from bottom story windows, clawing their way out of doorways through half-ajar doors. The air was full of screams. It was eighteen eighty two. We were ten men from the Fourty-Ninth Fire Brigade, in hard hats and tar-covered jackets. It was a summer day and it was beutiful. We had two horse-drawn fire carriages but no horses.
(more…)

“One flip,” Donnovan said. He laid his palm on the table, pulled it away — revealing an old, shiny quarter.
Rammy agreed behind him, the humming wordless way he used to agree with Donnovan — “hmahm”.
“If it’s a head you go back to your cell no fuss, that’s it, and we say goodbye and we part ways, adios.” “hmahah,” said Rammy. “If it’s not we look away for a couple of minutes with the door open and your handcuffs — oops! Gone”.
“One flip,” said the prisoner, whose name they now knew was Johnson. His hands were handcuffed to the chair behind him, and he looked chained and broken, like on some scene from a hardcore porno movie. His hair was disheveled, like his shirt, and he was talking to them through it. “Let’s make it interesting, ha? Boss? Kinda boring like you said it”.
(more…)

This house is seldom quiet. In the morning, before the city settles into its humdrum workday, it rattles with the subway cars tearing the tracks beneath it and the cars pushing and screaming their horns in the thick traffic. Then, when the city does settle, every two or three moments are marked with an old car dragging its transmission on the gravely road or kids shouting after a lost ball or a great truck moving slowly and bellowing in a giant’s voice. In the evening it’s the same: the subways cars shaking the foundations of the earth and the many cars above grounds rattling and crying like a mob in an earthquake. In the late evenings it’s the kids with their loud cars stereos: in the night, the drunkard hobos fighting over the best benches. Always someone around, making sound to let you know they’re there.

Then it gets quiet, for an hour, for a morning if you are indeed in luck. Maybe it’s a Sunday and nobody goes to work; maybe the snow fell thick last night and all the cars are stranded. In those rare moments you can hear the many birds chatting in that one tree next to the house, and they are nothing like the birds you knew as a child in the country. They’re louder and they all chirp at once, never conversing in their bird tongue, as if oblivious to the sound of others. In those moments you realize that in this constant city noise, all the birds have gone deaf.

On Thursday they announced they were able to distill passion. They would bottle it and sell it in little vials. It would taste terrible, but you could mix it with orange juice. On Friday the world ended.

It was a while since I’ve been to his house. As I enter I record everything that has changed: the new piano by the library and the table pushed next to the wall, abd the fresh flowers in the vase, and the new, pretty woman in the foyer.

“Where is he?” I ask. She wears a black dress that doesn’t become her. But she’s pretty; enviably pretty. She doesn’t answer at first, just gives me a frosty look that accents the distance between us: me at the door, she by the table next to the wall. Her hair is red. He always had a taste for bizarre women, I think, and then she answers: “don’t you know?”

“No,” I say, “I don’t”. I suddenly notice how sombre everything is: her black dress, the white flowers, the darkness in the house. She looks away and then at me.

“Hurt?” I say. She nods: no. “He’s gone now.”

The room is now colder, darker; I say, “surely…”
(more…)

“I,” says the man who stands by the pilot, “am unlucky in love”.

They nod and mumble in appreciation: they are all holding now-empty glasses. The bottle they left on the ground, and it is growing steadily far in its carafe, swimming in a bed of ice water. Just the thought of it growing so far away — a meter a minute — is enough to give you motion sickness. Above them the engine roars a muffled roar in the thin, windy air.

“And I am unlucky,” says an obese man, well-dressed in his wheelchair, “in health”.

“I’m unlucky all around on Mondays and on Thursday nights,” says another man. The airship sails, up, up, up; the men all whisked away in its shaky embrace.

“I am unlucky in my sciences,” says the man who invited them all. He wears a white suite and a monocle, the staple of a scientist. “Yet I am positive we shall succeed. I know not all of you have faith. But the best researchers are all united in agreeing in the theraputic effect of high altitudes on the Fortune gland beneath the cortex…”

Somewhere on the ship, a man in his shirtsleeves says, “I am unlucky with my children.” The man he talks to says his investments all started to falter the year previous, after he had fallen from an apricot tree. Then there’s a sudden wind that blows hard and rocks the airship, sending wine glasses overboard, and it exhausts all conversation — the confessions, the stories, the science lectures.

“I,” whispers the pilot, but they all hear anyway, “am unlucky in sailing”.