The Human Error

Jostling through the crowd I see the epicentre of attention: a young man fallen from the sky, face contorted by death, with a note pinned reading “Another failed attempt to fly.”

The Strings Are Cut

There are words. Oh, God. There are just so many words. So many words coursing through my head. They're in my blood. They're in my heart, and I feel them all throughout me until they are me and I am them and I've become a word, a word of words and I'm consumed by it, the literature becoming my soul and my soul becoming literature and I've become so closeted and so small and defined but so big and so imaginative and so expansive and I envelop everything that I am but I'm still stuck in these words these things that won't ever let go of their one thought their one direction and one desire to be what they are and nothing more and certainly no less, but I can't do that but I can be everything now but only one thing at a time and I can't do it and I can't stay tied down like this.

The Imperfections

Kieran Murphy, during the moonlight hours, could not be found in the pub, or at the dance hall, or boasting with the wagon men. He had in his mind a vision, something perfect and still and beautiful, something he could never get right. The nights he spent at his workbench consumed the best of him, kinship and merriment whittled away into a scrap pile behind the garden. When Kelly Mason went round to bring him milk and muffins, she always saw the most beautiful carvings. Ash, oak, sometimes cherry, all carved with the same vision of an angel, wings outstetchd above her head, her hands nailed to the cross. The angel was in agony, there was no denying it. But it was the sorrow in her eyes that brought Kelly near to tears. Kieran’s lip seemed to curl, looking at his dozens of carvings. Next week, Kelly would find none in the sitting room, and the scrap pile behind the garden would be even larger.

The Millennia Later

Desolation has its own stark beauty. It’s in the limbs of dead trees twisting up, pleading at the grey sky. It’s in the air, cold with a faint hint of smoke and the barest breeze that stirs up the dust at your feet. The white-grey ash falls like snowflakes, dusting your hair, your coat, your mask. You catch one of the flakes and it crumbles between your gloved fingers. The ground is packed as hard as concrete under your boots as you turn your back on this cold, still world. You look up; the moon is barely visible. You will carry that memory with you as you go back underground. Mankind no longer has use for the stars.

The Things I Could Never Say

I am searching for words, such words that would be the ark of my self. I wish to plant within consonants and syllables that which is the object of my desire, so as to bloom outwards, so that words become the soil for my emotion. My words will be pollen, drifting along by the current of my restlessness. They must be more than figures; homes to what I yearn to say with windows large enough for you to peek inside. They will be blood vessels, each a letter flowing in my veins so if I were to bleed out would spill a pool of words, and floating on the surface, like prophetic alphabet soup, they will spell out my love for you.

The True Value

"We're here for money." The tall, gaunt alien said in perfect English.
The president looked at his cabinet members, lost for words. Were they asking for ransom? Did they have unimaginable weapons pointed at earth? The most powerful man on the planet was at a loss. Cold beads of sweat formed on his forehead.
"Like this." He took a device out of his bag, opened it, and a hologram projection appeared out of thin air. An old book. More specifically, a Gutenberg bible. It drifted out of the center of the projection to be replaced by a roll of the Torah. Then the Koran. Sun Tzu's the Art of War. A copy of the US Constitution. Emerson, Poe, Twain. All looked like depictions of early editions of the works. "We are prepared to offer our money in return. Big money." He reached for a shiny metal rectangular box by his side. It had looked solid until he did something to it and reached inside, pulling several ancient looking spherical objects and one newer looking one. He twisted the newer sphere and it expanded, unfolding like an alien origami, exposing several surfaces with tiny scribbles on them. "This is a key. It will allow you to translate the others into Earth languages. We believe that's a fair trade, as you will see. And it will be just the beginning. We look forward to dealing with you."

The president asked "Why do you call this money?" The alien smiled, exposing blue-tinted teeth.

"Yes, you are a young species... From our research into your culture, what you call money is the ultimate symbol of power, is it not? You will learn from our money. Then this, and much more, will become clear to you."

The Little Things

It was the third time that the pilot light had gone out in a row. Maybe if it had held, if it had just complied and remained alight long enough for the heater to warm up, I wouldn't have lost it. Yell at no one in particular and scream my throat hoarse. Then again, it had been a bad day, and if it wasn't the pilot light it was going to be the empty tube of tooth paste in my bathroom cupboard or the dead remote batteries (I already knew they were on their last legs). Still, sometimes it feels so good to be angry at everything. Even if its nothing.

The Ending of Lives

Just then, a suspiciously bullet-sized hole tore apart several billion rather crucial neurons in his brain, causing this line of thought, and indeed the entirety of his flesh, to halt abruptly and not continue for the rest of time.

The Loveless Smudges

You never spoke about it, but I know you knew your father wasn't dead because each week you would receive a check with his signature. He can write, at least. When you were younger, I always watched you, waiting by the letter box or, if you forgot to wait, you careering across the yard at first sight of the postal carrier. You would study the envelopes for the old man's blocky handwriting. If it appeared, you would tear that bastard open. You pored over the checks, especially the John Hancock. You became a student of each loop and whorl; a professor of every dot or cross. If a curve became unexpectedly thick or severe or even, god forbid, broken, you would ruminate for days. What did these imperfections in his automatic mean? Did they indicate longing? A moment's hesitation? Was he angry? Upset? I imagine most children learn to read their fathers' moods from fatherly faces, paternal smiles, scowls, curious grins; you had the strange way ink dries on paper.

The Art of Leaving

You limped off into the woods, down the path we walked together for years. This time, you didn't invite me along.

The Collection

I sat there staring at the vase for the better part of half an hour. The layers were distinct, seeming to sway with the room. The bottom layer was mostly cheaper and synthetic corks, the sort of thing that fueled fervent and youthful works, the sort of writing that came together halfway through a bottle, a third of a way through a pack of cigarettes. The next layer had a bunch of champagne corks from New Years Eve and the ones from a case of cabernet my agent bought me after The New Yorker accepted a short story. After that the caps from several bottles of Scotch, a different one every week. They helped write the novel that eventually got me a deal with Vintage. The Scotch caps faded into more cab corks. No white corks though, I don't like white wine. The top layer was the one where there was no longer a correlation between bottles and certain chapters. Then the was the cork at the top that I had marked with a red Sharpie.
It was there to remind me: "This is the one that caused you to miss a deadline".

The One About Repeating Yourself

It's always 4am somewhere in the world and you find yourself sitting, waiting for the 4am line to move overhead before starting to think about life, where you are in it and where it's taking you, and why it's not what you thought you wanted and not even what you needed, but you rationalize that it is a dream come true. Albeit someone else's dream. And all you want to do is wake up. And you do wake up - screaming. And it's always a Tuesday. And you're always waking up too late. Anyway. He called himself Frank, but his father named him Frankly. Just so that he would be able to end each letter with Yours, Frankly and be able to save one extra word. His father was an engineer, I'm sure you can tell.

The Sunlit Child

You used to eat frozen cherries and I'd admire the way the juice stained your lips and fingertips. My house is too loud, the floors crack under the weight of too many feet coming and going, their voices seeping through the carpet, cigarette smoke and fake smiles.
I'd give anything to watch you eat those cherries again, mainly because then I could be back in that eternal summer of youth.

The Place Under The Trees

You always brought me to the same spot when you wanted to talk. The conversation would mostly consist of minute statements followed by gruelling silence. The cold air would be tense around our ears and lips, as if we knew some killer statement would strike and we would change these words to mean something bad? good? Who knew at this point? You puffed away at your cigarette in the snowy spot we picked as the silence remained. We never did talk that day.

The Social Protocol

Did you think I was cool when you met me? I worried about that. I worried that you would think I was too much when you met me. Because I was listening to Patti Smith while we watched Tim Burton movies, because I was too high to think straight and fell asleep all the time and wore those fake topsiders and hated everybody in my classes. I worried that you would think I was trying to be cool, and think that I was failing because all of those things were pretty not cool.
But I didn’t care a lot and you said “So you’re pretty eccentric huh?” when you met me and I said, “I don’t think so, no?” And I was confused. So we just danced at Sundance and drank filthy Stella Artois and kissed like hands trying to hold each other.

The Anchor

You know that point in your life when you realize that the house you grew up in isn't your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have a place where you keep all your stuff, that idea of home is gone. You'll see it when you move out one day and it just sort of happens and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you're homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like a rite of passage, you know. You won't ever have that feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, and your family and your kids or whatever, and it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it.
Maybe that's all a family really is; a group of people who feel homesick for the same imaginary place.

The Nostalgia

What is it the Greeks said about looking back? Or was it the Germans? Or the Aztecs? Something about how nostalgia is an insurance plan for a crappy future. Maybe they said it better. Regardless of who said it and how, I can't help but get sucked into all those memories, I want to kiss every single person in every single picture and tell them that it's good to see them again, let's sit and catch up, I think this will be ten times worse when mt friends begin to die.