Update on My Forthcoming Book
Work on what should be my next book, a collection of flash fiction from Bad Moon titled Herding Ravens: Bon-Bons and Cold Cuts, proceeds apace. The terrific Daryl Earnest is more than halfway done with the drawings now, and the volume should be released this summer. Here’s a story from the book, complete with Daryl’s art.
Political Poem
copyright © Christopher Conlon
She stepped into the shower and as the water sprayed her skin she began rubbing her arms with two coarse rags. She rubbed and rubbed until her arms were exhausted, long after the skin had been pulled apart like webbing and blood had run down her belly and legs. After many days of this rubbing she at last reached the final layer, past muscle and gristle and bone: and she found that she was, in the end, colorless; or, if not colorless, then a wispy indistinguishable color, like the stark edge of a desert horizon. Having succeeded as far as this, she rubbed the rest of her body clean of color as well: face, breasts, thighs, feet: and when she stepped out of the shower at last and looked into the mirror she saw only a hint of shape or form, like puffs of sculptured steam. Her dress fell through her body so she went naked into the street and found that no one else saw her and when they bumped into her it was as if they hadn’t touched anything solid but rather a mysterious hesitation in the air they walked in.
After many days and nights naked on the streets, hungry, shivering in the cold, she at last saw a few others like her huddling in doorways and under park benches. They looked like creatures made of water and she learned from watching them that they could not eat food, swallowing instead only tasteless unsatisfying shadows. Day after day she grew weaker and eventually she tried to speak to another of the water people but found that he—it was a man, she thought, but then again perhaps not—was strengthless, hollow, mute. Finally she knelt in the doorway where she had been living and waited, feeling doors flying wide inside her head. She crumpled then, tumbling weightlessly down the dark streets, shredding apart as she rolled.
[image error]art copyright Daryl Earnest#
