David Antrobus's Blog: The Migrant Type, page 10
May 4, 2018
Horse Latitudes
For nearly three hours, Cait sits in the chair in the silent room.
Once, she was the tiniest girl and no one even noticed her. And this is now not then, and she's still small, still quiet, and she is still mostly overlooked.
Traffic on the highway hums its deadpan melody. A yellow warbler sings counterpoint.
I no longer love the wineglass, just its stem, Cait thinks, while the brassy chime of an antique clock peals someplace behind her. Like sound will overcome her reticence. Like love won't...
April 28, 2018
Personal Attorney
The Man
When the ocean vomited him onto the beach, himself vomiting brine, there came a great wind rushing through the palms on the cusp of the jungle, making them twist in an agony of ecstasy.
The same cruel funnel of cloud that had left him shipless now drove the trees to flex and dance against their will. Vast phantoms reared up from the beach and sandblasted his eyes, and he cried out and staggered. Blinking, he turned seaward and saw only more approaching storms, great thirsting probosce...
April 21, 2018
Malocchio, a Regifting
When I saw it, my first thought was: I don't know what this is.
My second wasn't a thought but a nuclear gut punch, and the strangest sound escaped my throat, a feral and finite sound, and I vomited until I had nothing left but the lining of my innards with which to stain the snow.
Staining the snow alongside me was the mutilated head of my wife, the box that had until now contained it upended.
Yes, I've seen the movie Se7en. Liked it, in fact, grim as it is.
But nothing can prepare someone...
March 30, 2018
Lana and the Bear
Image © Michael O'Toole"I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb." — Oscar Wilde
He comes out of the mouth in the rock, underneath dripping, towering cedars, and stands swaying in the chill March air. More brown than black, his damp fur is matted as fever. Alone on a gravel curve, he hears the rage of dogs behind him, ahead of him, in all the directions, and knows he has to pick some astonishment of a path, som...
March 23, 2018
Mutiny
"Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask." — Oscar Wilde
She smiled at him in the evening. She wanted to cry, but she laughed. Gators slipped off the banks, dropped like sudden drab stones into the depths.
Don't drag me. I smell the bright smell of brass in the runnels of your fingertips. Make me your instrument.
"Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little always share."
Each time you want to say "I'm sorry," say "I love you" instead. It's only a tiny thing, really. Summon the g...
March 16, 2018
Each Snowflake and All the Snow
This Might Even Be a Poem
Grief falls like the gentlest of snow on the hedgerow. Shalista drives alongside.
Bye, Felicia, Calissa, Moesha, all her sisters in the rearview as she steers the rented Fiat (hired, they say) along an Irish backroad, wipers stiff and punctual as metronomes. Trombones in the tightest horn section.
Grief is each snowflake and all the snow. Tune the radio and listen to a man with a butterscotch voice recount atrocities. That there is our precise, our lurid century.
En...
March 9, 2018
What Dull Beast
"A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun." — W. B. Yeats
Does anyone know what this is? Can anyone pinpoint it? Dissect it?
Probably not. In fact, I'm almost sure not.
It's quite literally unspeakable.
The only thing with depth is the blackness. It's a hole in the Earth. Gray is just edges, cloud forms, the drab flat odor of clay, geese already passed, the sucking sound of wetlands.
I won't fall in. The hole, I mean. That's what I say. But here's the truth: I don't care if I do or if I don't. If...
March 4, 2018
Bleed
This is what all happened in one night, give or take.
"Elise, you are bleeding."
One Friday. A dream of a train ride. Suburbia deep into downtown.
"I don't care anymore."
Neon sobs and menstrual facades. Smeary and hidden.
"But you should."
Come with me. Come. This will be a story of concupiscent abstinence, a modest fleshy tale wrapped around unchaste bones. Sinless and degenerate, a miscreant jest, forbidden.
"I will tear your stupid pink-vermilion flesh with my yellowing teeth."
Are we...
February 23, 2018
Sunfire and Moonshine
When the moment comes for her to walk into the fire, she grasps it with an air of indebted love.
***
Look. None of this is literal; Selene pieces it together from splinters of shell, busted scraps of a thousand swollen hearts and hot redemptive ash.
Her genesis is flame and the cold, cold moon. A female story born from uterine fire.
Her earliest memory is of haze and smoke, a gauzelike diorama punctuated by harrowing screams and the hoarse hitching breaths of survivors. People on their bel...
February 9, 2018
Push Bar To Open
This is not a story.
***
After cancer took him the same year Elvis died, when I was young, I've seen the face of my grandfather most days since, in my dreams or projected onto my inner eyelids when I stop for a moment and rest and allow memory's fluid, capillary reach breach the dam of me.
***
This child: "I made a snowman today."
"It isn't snowing."
"Snow is just extra cold water, and it's raining."
"But—"
"It's there. You just can't see it. The rain keeps washing it away. If the rain woul...
