Havoc

by Christopher Bollen

Grief has no sense of theater; it nestles itself into the most ordinary corners of the day.

What do I do? I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck. I help them to press the eject switch. That’s one definition. Another? I sow chaos. I clean house. I change people’s lives for the better, whether they see it that way or not. Only once did my actions end for the worse. But I don’t like to think about the murder.

Maybe, in the end, this is his job, to be an unattainable object of desire, something upon which all of us splotchy white westerners can cast our daydreams. We are all thankful for his dedication to the role.

There’s barely a muscle or joint inside me that isn’t sponsored by some multisyllabic wonder drug.

Children aren’t the world’s inheritors, they are its thieves, skating by on the hard work of generations that came before them.

I know only too well what you’re going through. The pain never leaves you. You’ll wake up thirty years from now and want to gouge your heart out. The death of a child is a vacuum bomb. It destroys you over and over and over every minute of the day.