Archive for October, 2006
A taste of ammonia
It’s Halloween in the June Bride and I’m an invisible man sipping a large Irish behind a twist in the wallpaper. They’ve just discovered a body in Banglatown. Billy the Pill’s telling Crazy Carol and Zimmerman:
“So, Charlie’s having a curry in Brick Lane and he’s just about to order another couple of poppadoms and a [...]
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Textuality
The situation has long since ceased to puzzle or hurt me. Oh, for a long while it did. Every-time I saw a mother and child in the street. Real pain, like my heart being torn out with pliers. And the loneliness, all those terrible nights. But that’s all in the past now and everything’s normal. I accept events on a [...]
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Subway, someday
Down there in the big black, beyond the turnstiles and the ticket machines and the spies, there’s only the grinding pain and the emptiness and all the money gone, lost or wasted or cheated away.
The grey trains stop and go and stop and go in endless revolution, picking up and dropping off, making it and losing [...]
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Animus
He insists on the move. But her garden means everything to her and all they have at the new place is a small square of paved-over back yard with a potted plant and some creepers. She isn’t happy and she deeply resents him.
All attempts at communication fail. He smells her resentment all over the house. It’s in [...]
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Cloudy
It’s just before dawn when I come to. I lie still on my back for a while just staring at the ceiling then I drag myself over to the desk by the window and open up my lap-top.
The people from the labyrinth are awake too, walking around inside my head, talking, watching television, having dinner, [...]
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The Importance of mirrors
Everything stinks. There are no regions of close approach between spiritual latitudes. The psychic conjunctiva that seals in and protects the small details of self which help to preserve human sanity doesn’t exist. Only central issues matter, intelligence is collective, a broth of ersatz consciousness in a communal skillet, frozen, loveless and colourless. Normality skulks [...]
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A Congolese evangelist
Nicodemus pilots Matilda through the doors of R&B Worthy’s Tea Room and African Bakery and motions for her to sit herself down at a secluded table near the back of the shop.
“If you want to know a man from Zaire,” Louis-Marie Ndosimau, the proprietor, tells a small Chinese woman at the counter, “You must first [...]
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Mezuzah soup
It’s Sunday morning in her kitchen and Alice is boisterous in that dozy kind of way she often is after a good night out, still drunk, thinking and talking in pop song rhythms, Bappa Mamma Bip, Mappa Bamma Boom, as she makes the toast and brews the tea, meanwhile they’re striking up the band in [...]
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