Journey
without Maps
We must be lost. As the
driver, I should really know where we are. We drive around to get a sense of
place and pass payday loan shops, the bloated carcass of a dog, streets with
holes. A teenage girl writhes on the sidewalk, her right leg splayed at a
gruesome angle, her face contorted with pain. Huddled over her are a couple of
friends whose idea of help is to just yell, “C’mon! Stand up!” I keep asking
myself what is happening to my country. "If you see me,” the mass shooter
says in the latest tweet, “weep.”
A
Low-Hanging Heaven
What happens after you
pass this border? After you enter this gate? There’s no police force to protect
the city, no soldiers to defend it, no doctors to heal the sick. It’s a city
that breathes nothing, just like heaven. This is the best place for us. You kind
of get to escape. The inhabitants could be sleeping, could be dead, could be
dreaming – I mean, drunk. Look at the stones. There was a stone that people
would go and kiss. The stone melted. From kissing, melted!
Josef
K
This part of the river is
popular for suicide attempts. But if you go early, it’s not very busy. And,
yes, Josef K lived somewhere in the area, debt-ridden, detested, abandoned by
everyone, communicating only with pigeons in the park. Just up the street, I
encounter a wild-eyed woman walking in circles. “Please help, please help,
please help,” she keeps saying. The air around us swarms with particles of ash
and smoke, as if bodies are constantly being fed into industrial-size ovens. In
point of fact, modern homes burn 8x faster. There are so many fires you can’t
even see the sky.
A
Kind of Dream
And so there I am,
wondering what the music of the spheres would look like from the perspective of
a spy satellite, when I’m invited into the garish and absurd by a choir of
young believers who want the God of rivers and streams restored, and why
shouldn’t I be, as I’ve displayed more than once the misplaced confidence of a
small bird – a saltmarsh sparrow or a piping plover – that crashes full speed
into clear glass, and only to find myself in a kind of dream, where a few dozen
of us aged children are getting off a tour bus to the dark corners of a cherry
red dusk.
The
Misery Index
Today I went looking for
flowers for the funeral, but the shelves held only bottles, broken auto parts,
a basket with plastic eggs. On the way home, I saw, bent beneath a cat’s cradle
of clotheslines, a mom submerge her baby in a galvanized tub. Birds pecked at
her face, her hands, making a noise like “Ha-ha-ha!” as if there was something
in the situation that was screamingly funny. Maybe I’m a bad person – I just
kept on walking. When I got to the corner, I happened to look back. It was like
watching TV with the sound off, but you didn’t need sound to know if there was
a God.
Howie Good is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize. His latest collection is I'm Not a Robot from Tolsun Books. He co-edits the journals UnLost and Unbroken with Dale Wisely.
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