As we threw out the remains of the litter box we realized this was the last vestige of his physical presence—a fittingly catlike form of scattering ashes—and cried like babies.
How could something so wonderful even come to exist?
Whenever he spoke you would inevitably hear a faint muttered “cunt” off in the distance.
A grey, windy, wet morning—beautiful and alive in a way a more perfect one could never be.
The fire came up the hill faster than I could have imagined.
It was already in the house.
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Three feet of snow in June.
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All trace of your existence will be wiped from the face of the earth.
From the instant you vow never to forget, it begins to slip away
Really, I should be grateful; performing this mindless work spares me the burden of maintaining self respect.
We usually tried to avoid his visits, which often felt weighted with some unspecified tension or grievance. Later I learned that throughout this period he’d been in dreadful pain, and that our times together had been among the few things that distracted him from his suffering.
The house is quiet and cold. The washing machine has stopped working, joining the dead car battery, the leak in the roof, and the broken back window covered with cardboard. You sleep in the dark in the blue chair where, in happier times, your cat once joined you. You are a joke variant of a Hank Williams song, as interpreted by BJ Thomas.
One warm summer night when he was fifteen years old, he lit a cigarette on a dry hillside near San Bernadino, California. After all these years, he still couldn’t bear to confront the destruction caused by that simple thoughtless act—yet he did, unceasingly. How many times had he gone to bed hoping to not wake up? But dying wouldn’t help; he would need to have never been born.
1) infinite entry points for any text, image or situation
2) when the mind’s conception of itself becomes unsafe
1) Forced confluences of random or variable systems
2) Dislocation of expected boundaries in relation to contents
