Category: Fiction

“We were almost there, but what was the point. There was no relief, no release. Our home was a couple orders of magnitude more luxurious than those down here, but it was hardly any different. Inside was an eternal moonrise just the same, illuminating the marital bed I shared with this stranger.”

“Over my shoulder starlight slept on narcotic waves, where the boatmen, though I couldn’t see them, still mumbled across the water, probing blind for a body that lay bloated and dreaming under a sheet of ice.”

“Finally the sirens crest the howling winter, wailing off-key and plaintive like a wanderer lost in borderless tundra. She’s nauseated by the sound, and she opens the back door a crack to let the wind in. Snow melts into her clothing in dark pools, and the pain of the cold shuts out the gradual paramedic…

“Anichka’s footsteps banged out restless spirals through the dust and shadow, receded, and then were gone. I stayed on the floor, motionless in some sort of starry languor, and imagined the river. I thought of its reflections, though I couldn’t tell if the waters reflected the moon or merely an old warehouse lightbulb.”

“I thought of the girl again, picturing her at a lonely little table at one of the bars across the river, all of which were invisible now for the floating laker. I imagined her nursing a gin and bitters, smiling in her own curious way, running a hand through her hair, drumming her fingers on…

“Anichka nodded and gave me another cigarette. I took a few puffs and stared into the night sky, thinking of ancient sailors, centuried mariners forced to read their existence only by constellations and lunar phases, godly maps that, to them, were surely more real than the dull planks of the ships they sailed, more real…

“But the more I gazed at the moribund pastures from this odd view, the more it resembled a great potter’s field. Spurred by all this talk of the dead, I thought of old friends who’d long gone lost, their meek lives eclipsed well before their time. My mind drifted to car accidents, suicides, overdoses—horrors that…