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I was on the school bus when the second bird came out. The bus struggled up Trabuco Hill Road. Gears ground. This was the part every day when we all joked about getting out to push. Another year and I’d have my driver’s license. Then no more bus.
When they take the god out of you, you wonder at first if you’ve been killed, but it wasn’t very well done, and you wish someone would hurry up and finish the job. You were strapped down and touched with fire from shoulder to hip.
The beautiful princess was cursed by a wicked fairy to sleep for a hundred years. She slumbered in a bed of silk in the golden castle surrounded by tangles of briars and roses on the top of the hill. Nobody much cared. Why should the villagers have felt bad for the magically slumbering princess?
So I guess if I’m gonna tell you about the ghost, first I have to tell you why I had to go all the way to Mama Tee’s house in the first place. Basically, this one day last summer me and my boys were just chillin in the parking lot of the rec center. We […]
They come on trains; they come on buses; they come on planes to our municipal airport. A handful even arrive on foot, having walked the whole distance to our City with what scant possessions they could carry on their backs—only a few, to be sure. But more than have ever walked away.
I am running out of Words. I stumble down the temple steps, clutching my wounded side. I had been too slow to use my fourth Word and the prison guard’s spear had drawn blood before he choked to death under the weight of my suffocation spell.
Reduce, We’ll start with the easy one. We’re good at reducing! We’ve cut back so much already. Air quality. Polar ice caps. The winters where no one’s grandma freezes to death. What if we try reducing working hours? Preventable illness?
You revere your patron saints. Your Marys. Your Joans. Your Catherines. You should fear them. If one ever heeds your prayer, and she arrives stripped of skin, of fingernails, of every organ and every last fuck to give, her halo a boiling crown of furious yellow flames.
As children, we circled the crow chick that fell from its nest. Its wings were splayed heavenward like a saint’s, its brains streaked like veins of quartz across asphalt. Its neck arched back at a fossil-like, impossible angle. That was when I learned how fragile birds’ bones are.
An excerpt from the unfinished memoirs of Sullivan Kingsley. Text was dictated to and recorded by a Kvasir Scrivener™. Any poetic editorializing can be assumed in accordance with the spirit of Mr. Kingsley’s intentions, as interpreted by a conjured instance of the severed hand of Kvasir, Norse god of poetry, peacemaking, and beverage production.
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