truthfront

Tag: prose

  • The architect, a fragment

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    The architect remembered back to the first time someone tried to explain how his work made them feel. It was a young woman in drafting class in undergraduate school. She sat next to him and one afternoon he was immersed in his work and didn’t notice her staring over at what he was drafting. A lifeboat, she said, pulling him out of his creative trance. I’m sorry, he said to her. A lifeboat, she repeated. Looking at that drawing makes me feel like I’m on a lifeboat. The architect looked down at his drawing and then back to the woman’s face. She smiled. But I’m not sure if I’m saving someone or the one being saved, she said.

  • The fifth year

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    In the child’s fifth year it fully memorized all five of the sacred texts and decided to destroy them. While the rearing mother was outside the hut tending to the matters of the village the child tore the pages from the sacred texts and left the books spineless, ripping the lifeless pages even further so that the floor of the hut was littered with small bits of paper like shaved ice. The rearing mother arrived to find the child seated on the carpeted floor with a mound of paper scraps before itself, a sullen look on the child’s face, and the rearing mother didn’t understand what had happened until her eyes fell upon the disconnected spines of the texts, whereupon her eyes metamorphosed into a darkness deeper than night and she rushed over to the child, beating it with her open fists, screaming that the child was a devil, nothing but a devil, a devil all along, the child unconscious after the first ten or twelve blows to the head, and it wasn’t until an adolescent male villager outside the hut overheard the violence within and opened the hut door to find the holy child’s rearing mother astride the bloodied and motionless body of the pale king. The young man separated the rearing mother from the child and set her outside to face the fate of the profane while inside he tended to the child and ensured it was still alive, it was still breathing and could move. As the child’s broken bones healed and its wounds became scars the people in the village orchestrated a ceremony whereby the rearing mother was beheaded with a machete and her head displayed upon a stick for the people to parade about the woods with their torches of fire guiding them in the night. The people of the village sang and howled at their joy, they celebrated the holy death of the heretic, they returned to the village to find the child of god huddled by candlelight over its papers, its ever-present words and ideas that the papers couldn’t contain, for with age the human intellect activates, and the child, for reasons unknown to this omniscient narrator, had finally become convinced that the words he or she had been writing so feverishly were words or the pictures of words delivered directly from god, messages for the people, for the future, for all time and all people from the heavenly king. Everyone had been right, all the people of the village were correct, the rearing mother had indeed been the caretaker of a holy person, a medium between the common man and the god they worshipped, the child thought. The electric current of power slid though the child, intoxicating and rapturous.

  • in a parallel universe

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    There’s a man writing in a notebook and his hands are scarred and discolored from years of sun allergies and intentional damage, the scratching and kneading and pulling and tearing at the skin while in slumber. There are times when his hands don’t resemble his own but his father’s, or more like the memory he has of his father’s hands, so large and commanding, so devastating, a landscape of skin dominated by long, winding wrinkles and impossibly large veins that as a child, the writer thought were fat blue worms sleeping just beneath his father’s skin. The back of the writer’s hands have a spatter of light brown hairs beneath the pinkie knuckle, and this too he remembers as a characteristic of his father’s hands, a farmer’s hands, a ball player’s hands, a god’s hands. His cuticles, the writer’s, are dry and white with hardly any pale crescent lunula at the bottom, and the nails, carefully and frequently shorn so that very little white exists at the free edge beyond the fingertip, are deeply ridged in parallel vertical lines. He works with his mind but his hands are responsible for the effects of his work: elucidation, translation, illustration. The insides of his hands (the palms), are deeply seamed with wrinkles (age, use) and hard, gelatinous callouses like yellow patches at the base of each finger. It amazes him, his hand. He wonders what his hands say to others about him. There is a purpose for everything on this planet, he thinks, and thus writes. He feels that he is a failure, this man, and that he is forever damned to failure. Perhaps his hands will save him, they’ll claw their way up from the premature grave of the writer’s design, they’ll brush the clumps and grains of moist earth from his body.

  • Slumber party

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    I wake thrashing in the night, bedclothes soaked through and enfouled. Something is wrong, there is an intruder in the darkness. I don’t remember having dreamed but there is fear and panic and I cannot waste time, for I must arm myself with whatever is close at hand to defend my body and defend my home and I reach for the bedside lamp to douse the room in light to find the intruder (monster) standing over me or my sleeping wife who’d never hurt anyone, not purposely, not ever, and as quickly as my mind seeks her out in the darkness it returns with impossibly horrific images of her corpse and with a flick of my hand the light snaps on and of course there is no one but the intruder of consciousness within pulling me back into dream and then I begin to remember. I look to my wife sleeping (ostensibly) peacefully and there’s a flashlight clutched tight in my hand raised to attack and I set it down gently, though the panic has not yet abated in full, for I know that the stranger lurks still in the room, it is I, the stalking assassin of my dreams.

  • At sea

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    I looked over at her. The breeze tossed her hair, a dark nest of serpents at dusk. She looked out to the darkening world beyond the lights of the vessel and I could see that she was in her forties but that time had been gentle with her. I was curious about her, as I knew she was curious about me, but with age comes a particular degree of respect and decorum, and neither of us would yet voice our curiosities.

    The solitude, the mystery, she said. I can’t help but hark back to a time when the sea was all there was.

    I smiled and nodded, leaning over the deck and looking down at the water again. The pitch and roar of water cascading upward towards me.

    I hope I’m not disrupting your peace, she said.

    No, I told her. It’s fine. It’s nice to hear a voice other than the voice in my head.

    I can certainly understand that, she said, and for the first time we looked each other in the face.

    How long have you been aboard? she said.

    I boarded this morning in Madrid.

    After a lengthy pause, she said, I’ve been on this ship for three months tomorrow.

    I looked at her, wondering what might have brought her out to sea for so long, what sort of personal outrage forces a woman and her family to seek refuge in the great abyss for such an extended period. Then I remembered almost immediately that the abyss calls for all of us at one point, and we all of us must answer that call.

    Have you found it particularly dangerous? I asked.

    Actually quite the opposite, she said. I’ve found these past few months, and especially the last few days among the most peaceful of my life.

    Congratulations, then, I told her. The erstwhile world is not nearly in the same condition.

    Would you be interested in a brandy? she asked me.

    I’m afraid I would, I said, smiling at her.

    You don’t strike me as someone who fears many things, she said.

    We left the deck sinking into shadow and walked down through the narrow corridors of a labyrinth to her cabin, which was not far from my own. I sat on a stool near her cot and watched as she poured brandy from a small bottle into two plastic cups. She sat on the bedding and we touched cups and drank, feeling the gentle rock and sway of the ship in the water. The brandy was good, almost as fine as something Jorge would have kept stowed in his desk drawer, but not quite, perhaps a bit too sweet. The woman’s cabin was similar to mine and everything was tidy and well kept, much like the woman herself, who looked at me through dark pools and then down to her cup, and in the soft light of the room I could at last make out the delicate contours of her face and neck, the elegant geometry and proportionality, her eyes and hair a matching depth of black, and she said to me, or perhaps to the room in general, to herself, to no one, I’ve dreamt that the world is going to end.

  • Subtle differences

    I sat alone at the bar contemplating life and the bartender’s bare legs and everything else swept past without my knowledge, without my understanding, for I was lost on that current and was happily lost, pleased with myself and contented in thought without restraint and the world continued to pass me by for an hour, two hours, three or four drinks, I’d lost count, there is nothing so noble (nor elucidating) as losing count and yet not feeling the effects of the alcohol, not absorbed in anything save the self and rumination and the paths upon which the self propels me. Two years ago I sat in the same bar on the same day thinking different thoughts (drinking different drinks) and my appearance had changed and yet not. On that day I’d had four or five drinks (I forget now), I was still that person with the twitching eye and the black hat and the sore muscles and what the fuck. But the bartender was there just as she always is (just as she is now) and the lights in the place are dim enough for me to see clearly, without regard for my appearance, for all that matters is thought and contemplation and deep labored breaths and the thirst I always feel for a beer or two or perhaps three (I’d prefer to lose count) and those smooth legs beginning down at the soiled ground and rising to a place warm and unseen and no doubt soft and salty, but then again I should probably refrain from such thoughts, as I’m married, and I lied just now, there is no bartender, or there is a bartender but it’s a male bartender wearing pants rather than a female in shorts (as I’d imagined) and so I must come clean, I must admit my lie and restate the obvious fact that nothing is what it seems, either for a reader or a writer, nothing is ever what it seems. In the future I’ll discard such nonsense as it swirls about the canopy of my mind, I’ll write about something that matters, I’ll feel inspired and the inspiration will cast me to a place far and clean and clear and thus my mind will follow, I’ll write about important matters and I’ll explore the hardships that plague others or the hardships I’ve encountered through the years and the infinite whispers, the hardships and the methods I’ve discovered to combat them, and if not combat them then accept them, and if not the hardships then the malaise, the depression (though I despise that term), the melancholy. I appreciate music but only a select few types of music (whatever marks the soul of the listener with the scars of he or she who’s created the music, just as with all forms of art), and thankfully an example of those scars plays from the speakers overhead and it all reminds me of another winter in another time but at this same bar with a different bartender and someone else’s legs (different drinks) and I sit here thinking of that other time and how there have been so many other times in this particular bar, I’ve carried the torch for this place for a decade or better. My typewriter (wireless computer) is like an instrument, I weave chords and percussive rhythms in haste and one of these days I’ll write something meaningful again, I’ll have nothing to worry about and my words will immortalize me (different words). When the future arrives I’ll know it, it will be too stark and recognizable to pass me by, unlike the present, which flings past like so much molecular warfare, down there in the trenches, literal and figurative, and now I’m not entirely sure in which direction my destiny points. Words fling past and ricochet far too quickly for my taste or my comprehension of them (different words) and I try to capture the words before I can no longer, I do not want to be left behind by the words and perhaps my attempt at understanding fails me because I’m simply not capable, I don’t have the strength or intellect nor the fortitude and so I must refine my game, if I must call it that, refine my skills and sharpen my sword, so to speak. Nobody will read this, and that’s fine with me, perhaps it’s not meant to be read except only by a select few, just like my novels (different stories), or such is the fate the novels thus far, a select few prone to thought and fear and trembling and all attitudes of despair, no, give them a bit more credit, find a current for them to ride that doesn’t include me, for they are different and have paid their own fare on this route, they are perhaps more capable of living a life without self-disgust, self-disregard, capable of reading many things that inspire and provide sustenance of some kind, when the same should be said about my novels (different flavors), if only other people could read them, for I do not waste my time and I do not feel a need to justify my life via any means other than in the words, for it is always and only in the words, it is in the peculiar pattern of words on the page in which I exist, solely on the page where the breathing occurs (different breaths) and the dreams live and die and tomorrow will be a better day and the blood that courses finds reason to continue its course just as I continue to read to breathe to write to continue living this farcical dance. 

  • The fear begins

    Roots

    I wake thinking of my mother, just as with every morning, no matter the haze or the rain, no matter the cold, I wake with the birds outside the window and air chilled taut seeping through the crack, I wake thinking of my mother though I hadn’t dreamed of her. I dreamed instead of a bulbous tree root, rotting yet strong, predictable, nothing exceptional other than its existence, a bulbous tree root deep in the ground where a faint seedling hatched long ago, springing upward toward the world of light and air, a seedling burst open like a cellular flame into the high day. On my right hand is a scab and I don’t remember how or when the wound was received and yet there it is, about the size of a small coin, scaly and maroon by the light of the window in morning repose. I lick the scab and it is dry and salty, its saline scales bulbous like the tree root of my dream, bulbous and asymmetrical. I pick at the scab, I study it, I try to understand. Is not the human body remarkable? Does not the world seem as though it were made for man alone? 

    I wake thinking of my mother and continue thinking of her until I force myself up out of bed with the birds singing somewhere outside, bleeping, chanting, a coded gesture of communion, I force myself up out of bed and to the desk, looking down at it, the clutter of papers and three books, all rented from the library and thoroughly read, my current notepad nearly full of words, a glass of water from last night, just a few hours ago, an apparition, myself a walking apparition. I think of my mother just as I do each morning despite not having dreamed of her and I don’t know what to believe, none of us really knows what to believe, we’re all apparitions, or the memories we so tightly clutch are all apparitions. Apparitions of apparitions. This desk, the books and notepad, the finger-smeared glass of water, this is my life. This is my life now as I know it. I sigh and sit down to write, the chair so familiar beneath me:

  • An excerpt from Esperanza’s story

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    For the stone throwers and the sword wielders are as primitive as their ancestors and the ancestors of their ancestors, toiling in seas of blood and upon rolling hills of flesh to remain alive, to survive, which is their ultimate state-of-being, their highest conceivable honor, an achievement, but ultimately their most enduring failure. Man is a mortal creature; this is one of the few things we can attest to knowing. So while the stone throwers and the sword wielders ache and kill and burn the people of the world as well as the world itself, the thinking men resurrect the spirits that came before and also failed, the spirits with blood on their shadow-hands and in the ducts of their eyes, blood in the hair and caked upon their faces, blood forever adrift in their guts, for they as killers and hunters were largely unable to translate into language the narrative of those innumerable hunts and kills, their bloody and authentic histories, their failures, and so those spirits must now rely on a spare population of posterity to conjure them back into the realm of the living so as to pass on their bequests to equally indifferent hunters and killers and the few enlightened souls who must transcribe for them.