Skip to main content

Mix Up

 Mix Up


I’m sitting in traffic. It’s rainy. I’m tired. Stacy reaches across me, spins the dial, says something about wondering if they’ll say the big numbers— 


A jovial voice begins to read: 


“Aaand the winning numbers are—“


Static hisses. Splits the words into pieces, drowns them out. Another voice comes on, a man. His words come out in that paradoxical so-fast-it’s-slow-way, a calm terror. I go very still. 


“—- it would appear that all communications with our ambassadors in the Soviet Socialist Republics has ceased. I’ve been told that the White House has been evacuated and— and that we will receive a…” 


The voice falters. Stacy is gripping my arm like we’re both overboard, clinging in cold and black bottomless water. 


“Nuclear weapons have been launched by the Soviet Union to the United States. You are not hearing me incorrectly. We have lost contact with our correspondents in West Germany, and just now in London and Iceland. We will stay on air as long as possible— God help us.” 


The static comes again and the voice is gone. When I look at Stacy again, she’s porcelain pale, big blue eyes watery and uncertain. I force a laugh but it comes out like a bark. 


“It’s just a joke”, I say, “some asshole having a laugh.” She nods, swallowing, fumbling for a cigarette. To this day, we still talk about it quietly, about the rainy day we heard the world end. Just not *our* world.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Find Your Own Way Out

 Find Your Own Way Out What if things could be undone before you’d done them? Or after? What if you could be rewritten, and never know it? What’s beyond time, what’s beyond death? What lies out in the places between places, above and outside of places? What’s in the basement and the attic of God, the places he won’t look, won’t open up to us? That’s what the note said in the empty, cold house.  It’s handwriting was rushed, the letters looping and stretched, trying to run away from the page to somewhere else. Somewhere else beyond the ominous meaning, the fate of whoever wrote it.  Water drip-drip-drips  from the faucet. Trying to fill that uncomfortable, hungry silence. Something thumps  in the attic, wood creaking before abating back into the quiet.  There are things in the house. There is nothing in the house.  Empty picture frames that you can feel unseen smiles from. If you’d run your hands across the walls there would be the essence of dust from a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tall Grass Kingdoms

We stay up late. Walk through the tall grass, let it’s fingertips anoint us in quiet summer rites. The disembodied orchestra rings out from everywhere, crickets creaking and frogs tolling and bats chittering; the voices of coronation, our adoring audience.  Sweep hands outward to our sides, catching waves of iridescence. Fireflies everywhere, indomitable omnipresent, and between them and the star-crowded sky above it’s like we float out in a mystical cosmos. All alight. All ablaze.  Home is somewhere far away, beyond us. Lost and forgotten like schedules, like good habits. We’re runaways, self exiles hungry for adventure. We share words, drawn so close by that impossible summertime magnetism.  But at the end of the night, standing up in the tall grass, home is just over there, over the hill and the fireflies are a dim trickle. Inviting stars turned cold, unblinking. We share fragile smiles— the last we’ll exchange.
Post a Comment
Read more

Review

 “It’s you this time.”  Look at everyone. All the staring faces. So many wide, watching eyes trying to mask their terror. The macabre interest hidden just behind is all to obvious— because you’ve done the same thing when the Calls came. It was you a few days ago, watching the Selection, feeling the strange thrill spasm through you. Fear from the potential, arousal from the promise, and all of it mixed by relief when someone else was chosen. You too had been part of the many quiet whispers and loaded, meaningful wordless looks. Thinking. Who would it be this time? Who? Why? Why were they chosen?   Someone coughs and all your thinking implodes. That was then . This is now. It’s you. The stares, the quiet whispers and exchanged glances; a solar system of human emotion all about what you will undertake. You lower your gaze to the Phone.  That’s just what it is. A Phone. Sharp, elegant glistening black. It should be worn, scuffed from all that usage, it’s paint changed fr...
Post a Comment
Read more