The Spear Cuts Through Water

by Simon Jimenez

How old you are outside this dream is irrelevant; in this theater you are as you feel—a youth, deep in your adolescence, and, like all youths, lonely in your own unnameable way.

You never thought it was a love story, for in his story there was no love. There was only a long road of bodies.

Fathers leave in all sorts of ways. Some of them leave in the dark. Some leave only in their heads, while their bodies remain, staring at the world around them forever distantly. Others fade out over time, like an old photo rubbed raw. Many, gone in an instant.

“I hope that their end was mighty.” “I’ve yet to witness an end that was,”

“I have lived a long time,” she said. “And the longer I live, the more it surprises me, and saddens me, how wise the young must become to live in this world.”

My father was coming toward me. I had never seen him panicked before. I had never seen him scared. That’s what terrified me the most; not that he was going to kill me, but that even he could be broken.

There were some memories inside of him that were like picking up a sharp rock, but not this one. This one was like a note scribbled on a piece of ripped parchment, worn from its time in the pocket, the message dire, but the writing soft and faded.

The stories are everywhere, you cannot avoid them. Every day you tell a story to yourself; the details of your day become a part of your myth. It is reordered. It is made sense of.

“Fuck off,” he said, which, to Keema’s ears, had the same melody as I love you.

they saw that they did not need the power of a god to understand how deeply they were wanted.

“I may never sleep again,” he said. To which Keema replied, “Then neither will I.”