David Antrobus's Blog: The Migrant Type, page 14
April 7, 2017
"Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground"
Even if he'd been a small man he'd have been a big man. But he was a big man. I see him in his chair at the peeling formica table, on the right facing the tiny kitchen itself, slumped, in what some now call a wifebeater but then we simply called a vest—baggy trousers, cuffs rolled, braces over the tea-stained vest. White hair nicotine yellow, swept back. A soft pack of nonfilter Woodbines and a mug of sweet strong milky tea. Ten or fifteen bottles of prescription drugs ranked like soldiers i...
March 31, 2017
Monarch
The wind gets up and sweeps our fires into streams of sparks, and we huddle closer inside our reams of rough hessian. Who knew the gales would blow so long? This is our place in the town square, our moment in the dreamscape, our truth within the chapel. Press those pedals, let the tiny organ wheeze its banal statute. Unfurl its rules. Queen, open your warm vaults to me, force me to partake of your exotica. The blizzard is here already; no one will speak again.
"Wait."
No, I will not wait.
...March 17, 2017
Los Irish
This short tale is only a small part of something larger, I'm hoping. Oh, and happy St. Patrick's Day.
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It was a scene right out of Chandler, except I'm no gumshoe. A rain-soaked back alley at night, distant neon smeared abstract by the tireless storm. She wore Docs and a faded cotton dress, some reptile print. Gators or iguanas or some shit. Close-cropped hair and makeup-less. Celtic eyes dark as oxbow tannin. Her dress in the downpour so thin she might as...
March 10, 2017
Back Story in Green
“The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.” — Claude Lévi-Straus
***
You see me standing in line waiting for a good life? See me there? Yeah, I was in that line once, along with most everyone, waiting for the gods to dole out something good and nice and kind. But they didn't, of course. And I kept going back to that line, even though the gods ignored it or, worse, spit on those who made roll call. But it weren't ever gonna happen, was it? I went on and saw people...
March 3, 2017
Some Dire Indian
[image error]Stillness. A lime-green-and-cream fifties model Buick by a lake. Backdropped by a silent bank of conifers, half-lit by a quarter moon. A woman in a headscarf stepping gracefully into a boat. A shadow man taking her hand.
You think you know what's happening here? Well, you don't.
Back then, we summoned from nothing the possible. We dreamed up heists in our methamphetamine haze and enacted them. Constantly amazed they worked. Purloined heat from frigid matrons. Took what was undoubtedly ours....
February 17, 2017
Forever Girl
Before they hit the bars they agreed to meet and eat at TGI Friday's.
The evening was liquid. Streams of colored light reflected on roads teeming with mingled fluids, wished-for outcomes made manifest.
Her friends had eaten all the cheese-covered nachos. To hell with them, she thought. I will be the virtuous one and eat a plain chip without cheese or sour cream or even guacamole. When she closed her eyes and placed the chip in her mouth and let it sit on her tongue, she was suddenly twelve ag...
February 4, 2017
Nineteen Sixty Nine
It was nineteen-sixty-nine. When the man in the marketplace began raving, it wasn't a market day, so there weren't many witnesses. Me, of course. And one of the shopkeepers at Simpkin and James came out to hear the racket, the bitter mammalian gist of cheese and coffee coiling in his wake, earthy and comforting. Scattered bystanders stood white-faced while the man screamed about impossible things.
***
A red maple leaf flapping in a high wind. Twilight and the night itself shuddering. The drif...
January 27, 2017
Earthbound
That was the day I woke up tired.
A sepia dream 'bout trains fading like a station abandoned.
"You okay, homeboy?"
"Nah."
"What's up?"
"Usual."
Didn't know it was possible to be so bone-worn drained. Didn't want to keep talking about it, though, so I grabbed a lukewarm coffee Estelle made earlier, poured some of that hazelnut creme shit all poor people seem to like better'n milk, and drank it in one, for the caffeine, the sugar, and nothin' else. Tasted like scorched ass with an undertone of...
January 20, 2017
My Week on the Shoulders of Small Giants
Sunday. Such a European scene: a tumult of starlings shocked into curling spirals by the clamour of bells.
You walk down the narrow staircase, twisting, the adobe walls beset with dark-framed photographs and paintings, small tubs of flowers on every half-lit floor. A hollow airless silence like the preemptive mourning of the world.
"I wanted to write play. How you say? A story with much art. Its title is The Aching Breasts of Juliette Binoche, and it is deep comment on feminine beauty and mot...
January 6, 2017
Hope in Any Other
Steve Hebert"Isn't that what matters?"
The rest of what she had to say was drowned out by the falls.
We gathered our equipment and began the hike back down to the trailhead.
But yes, I thought. It is what matters.
And also, that was the last time we or anyone else saw her.
Spem in alium. Did you hear? The hidden choir, singing "Be mindful of our lowliness" in a dead language?
***
Christmas Day. We found our way back into town and heard George Michael died. No one cried about it until later;...
