Here are some short pieces I’ve come up with recently, between the composition of my latest novel.
“Afterimage”
You touch his skin only in narrow, clandestine corridors of time, the time between the thought of ascent and the surfacing of a body. You taste his spit only in afterimages, in a numb hexagram of spiralling remembrances. You see his face, now as ever, only as a pale reconstruction, free of flowing golden hair, in some Bildungsroman purgatory. You cannot remember if he is pretty anymore because you have not seen him in six months. You will never see him again.
You cannot explain why he comes back to you, but he does, like a whispering wind, like the conjuring of some past mistake. You squint your eyes and commit it to memory, though it leaves so quickly in the ten seconds you have to write it down. Then you picture him with a girl, not some Toni Morrison devotee, aspiring novelist, enjoyer of political thrillers. You cannot let him trouble you like he used to, so you forget his body, his lips, his violence. You forget it and surge to the surface.
“Assembly in Barusan”
On a morning of temperatures near fifty degrees below zero, the chugging sound of Hagglunds could be heard upon the horizon, descending on the port town of Barusan on Dronning Maud Land’s rigid coast. Frizzle-feathered and patched up in scratchy jackets and dark-blue beanies, a mob of cookers arrived up at Barusan Town Hall. All hail the erstwhile governor’s cry! Albana Babana stood upon the steps, glad to see her clarion call had been answered.
They came enthusiastic, the ice-covered dock workers, the crimplene-covered bank clerks, the freeze-dried grocers, the failing snowcat salespeople. Feathers of black and white graced the snow as the hall doors opened, not a Human or Petrelese in sight. They carried their banners, their Verxcan jumpers, their Make DML Great Again hats, their Dronning Maud Land flags. Soon enough, a band of nutty libertarians led the march of the district’s numerous conspiracy theorists into the building, mixing in with the blues and greys.
“It is time for Dronning Maud Land independence,” the erstwhile governor probably declared, but no one had cleaned out their earwax, and no one could hear over the scratching of jackets. It was no time before someone brought up the deep state and the socialist cabal, the environmentalist world government following soon after. Every time Albana muttered out some exclamation, the crowd cheered out in squawking and quaking, waving their flippers and wings, proclaiming the sovereignty of the new Kingdom of Alboss.
Eventually, the meeting was broken up when a clique of racists began to catastrophise about the Petrelese and the foreign Humans living in Al Gawinn and the progressive pockets of doom, proclaiming a new republic for the Penguinese and Albatrossian species only. The gatherings cycled out in dismay, wandering back to their military-grade Hagglunds to fire off once again, back to whence they came.
“Bruce Has Blown the Bugle”
The grey shoe-wearing brigade
I could tell you all about it
The whole quotation, perfectly recited
A bugle blown, a clarion call
I clean granules from the percolator
A ritual of normalcy, yet it tires me so
I am struck by the realisation of time
I am no longer fourteen and lovelorn
Hulme, Atwood, Archer, Walker
I look at the bookshelf, searching for answers
Something there will change my life
Some things there already have
Tired, tired, my body seems to scream out
I do not know if it is normal
Constant utterances, worry and warning
I am where I must be
AeroPress, percolator, moka pot
I will choose one and move on
I once lingered, keeping it all in
Now I release what is unwanted
And store the rest for later dissection
Bleys Robertson 