If you’ve tried to contact me, please try again here! The new form will let me know. My apologies.

Meanwhile, I’ll just lie here thinking about the 17 unknown messages and how many of those were Gordon Ramsay offering me a dream job as his traveling writer.

I’m sure none of them were though.

I mean.

I’m almost positive.

And staring into the heat of 

Flames I created

Camping

I forget with who or 

Exactly when

I got too close and

Didn’t realize

Until much later

My eyelashes singed 

Short, like the bristles of

A beard

They grew back

My brief concern,

like all my mother’s warnings,

Unfounded in reality 

So now

Every time I lean in close to

The heat 

I can’t help 

Running my fingertip along

My lashes

To make sure

I’m still all there

And my mother isn’t

Which makes the sweat pooling on his brow
and the distant look in his eye
all that more terrifying and impossible to understand. 

When you came out of the operating room, I was so glad you were alive, I say. 

That was selfish, he says.

He’s right. I’ve never known this pain 

and I’ve never been good 

at putting away

my own.

Have anxiety?

Maybe they do

Built up, bubbling, pressure

Moments from explosion

The density 

Of responsibility

And thermonuclear fusion

Creates mass 

Carried effortlessly 

By nothing and everything 

The tipping point between 

A black hole 

And everything we know

that captivate an essence.

They erupt forth from their massive centers,

branches hurtling for the sky,

touching it and falling short all at once.

Dark white bark envelopes this creature

like pale, leathery skin; joyously aged.

Your cacophony of limbs wraps around me,

oh living thing,

like the warm heartbeat of a friend.

Painted on its tips, a thousand small (green) fragments;

infinitely different shades of one sweet voice.

Oh hot breeze, you stir me forth

from this forgotten forest.

It is the bat, in a resounding hit, connection –

the wind a supple amplification.

The earth below me slowly shifts,

as the snakes grow from tree bottoms,

bringing life to the towers,

yet dying, to escape.

Their heads break surface

and mirror the netted canopy above.

The trees surround and smother,

as I suffocate on oxygen – and –

the horrifying, miraculous

unknown of life.

Tense, I cannot move, for fear of proving

I am not as important as they.

When Martha recognized what it was, she paused… then sat down. She fingered the object in her hands idly as her eyes turned inward. Though she’d asked her mom to buy it because of how stylishly it accented her dark hair, it ended up spending more time in her hands. Open, closed, open closed: a fidget toy for the perpetually nervous.

Her favorite.

When not assuaging waves of anxiety, the clip was carefully positioned above her left brow, holding back long, dark brown hair. It made its appearance at every major social function and received many compliments from awkward adults who didn’t know how else to talk to children.

Drama came to mind, the kind arising from middle school misunderstandings. Someone else had a purple clip, too, but not this exact kind, and Martha tried her best to assert ownership. Finally, as all things do, it got back to an authority figure and Martha’s silent companion was restored to her. Fervently, Martha remembered, she had wished to be an adult so she could have control. She could avoid the drama and stupidity so prevalent in the world of children. She’d have control over the things that mattered to her.

Martha’s throat was dry. It was surprising to find the clip where she did. A child’s object in a child’s room, but not the little girl’s property after all. Martha wondered if her daughter had found the little purple thing somewhere in Martha’s things and taken a fancy to it, stealing it for her own personal collection. How typical of the three-year-old.

When had Martha lost the clip? Sometime in middle school. Maybe it succumbed to the growing mass of bobby pins, hair ties, bands, gels, styling agents and more drowning her old child’s things. The bathroom drawers become filled with new ideas of herself, different from who she was but crying out promises of future accolades. The clip was long forgotten as time inexorably ticked on.

The nervous girl turned into an even more nervous adult.

Her cell rang, yanking her from her fog. She answered. It was Jose again, asking how she was doing. If she had gone to therapy. How did it go.

Quietly, Martha answered and when Jose was satisfied she’d make it through the day, the call ended. Martha slowly put the phone back. She leaned her head against the wall where she’d been sitting. Her eyes closed as she struggled to keep herself in check. Jose wouldn’t like her to be cleaning this room again.

Her hands moved of their own accord: open, closed, open, closed. The snap was refreshing, relieving almost. As though pieces of her tension were released through a small tear in the fabric of space – a hole through which she could drop herself, piece by piece.

Martha remembered being yelled at in class when she had been clicking her clip unconsciously, not even aware she was doing it. Why did others care if she were doing it? It distracted. It annoyed. It made other people nervous when she did what made her feel better.

Maybe that was when she lost it. When she stopped trying to feel better and started trying to feel like others.

Open, closed. Open, closed.

Suddenly, she got up and went to the bathroom. She looked at herself. Hollows under her eyes and messy hair. She hadn’t put effort into her appearance in a long time.

Martha reached up and put the purple pin in her hair, above her left brow. Too messy – the pin slid forward, unable to hold her masses of tangles.

It took Martha a few minutes to find where she had last put her brush. She spent several more minutes brushing out the dark curls. Finally, she returned to the mirror and lifted the clip once more to her hair.

Even brushed and wetted, Martha’s hair would not comply. The clip may have been enough to maintain her when she was 11, but now her thick hair was too much and the clip gave up too easily. All it was now was a fidget toy.

And doesn’t a fidget toy lose something when it’s real purpose is gone? It’s just trash.

Martha went back to her daughter’s room and sat down in the same spot. She fiddled with the purple clip. Open. Closed.

It was about 3:30 pm. Her daughter would have been coming home from elementary school around now. Or would Martha have her own car in this alternate reality?  Maybe Martha would be the kind of mom to pick her daughter up from school instead of having her walk.

Martha thought of all the other mothers, lining up now along the school sidewalk, engines idling as they waited for their small children to come pouring out of the school, yelling at and cajoing their friends as they moved en masse toward their parents. Martha thought of little shoes, half off at Payless. Second graders toting big plastic superhero-themed backpacks the same size as their little bodies as they smiled at their mothers and told them about the bug they ate at recess.

Martha’s fingers were moving a mile a minute, snapping the old metal back and forth until finally, with a small metallic sigh, it broke.

Martha stopped, looking down at her hands and the small pieces of broken metal. Trash. After several long moments, Martha got back up and looked at her daughter’s room, unchanged in four years. She’d been cleaning the dust and dirt, but now didn’t seem to have the heart to continue. She turned off the light, closed the door behind her, and threw the purple clip away.

Re: Notice of intent to evacuate

Dear Monsieur or Madam,

This expertly crafted letter constitutes my written notice that I will be departing from the plush comfort of my basement chateau on August 15^th, at the end of my ethological study into the life of the native species Tipsy Kickface, or alenniam drakus.

Enclosed you will find $63.00, which will cover the last portion of August I will spend in my chateau farting on all furniture in preparation for my tragic departure.    

I expect that my security deposit of $10,000, given to you in the form of gold bullion, will be refunded in full, since the room has been left in quasi-alright condition. I have full confidence you can remove the human pee stains and dried vomit in time.

I can be reached via homing pigeon or fire signal after the above date. Please take care not to do so, however, as I loathe human contact.

Sincerely,

The Farting Duchess Anastasia

Ice shook in cocktail glasses and half-drunk patrons vaguely shot questioning glances around them. Tim paused for a moment mid-shrug, then remembered he wasn’t in California anymore. He ran to the edge of the outdoor bar to peer at the sky, but saw nothing of note.

The earth shook every one second, spaced out, like with footsteps. Everyone, including Tim the bartender, heard the giant rooster before they saw it. It’s cawing sounded profoundly more monstrous coming from a 30-foot beak. A dinosaur, Tim thought. It sounds like a dinosaur. While TIm was thinking this, however, his patrons had already begun scrambling to the street and away from the sound. They fell over high-tops and clutched their sunglasses to sun-bleached hair as they made their escape.

Tim wasn’t sure where he could possibly run – he wasn’t sure if he were dreaming, or roofied? Could someone have slipped him some acid? Those kinds of shenanigans his friends might have pulled back in San Diego, but not here.

It’s disconcerting, how the whole body tangibly reacts to extreme vibration; as each massive claw crumpled the hot asphalt below, Tim’s organs shifted and his heart stopped. This could not be real. Yet the empty street and the far-oo screams weren’t dreamlike; they were too crisp and the fear hit his spine too directly.

There was a giant fucking rooster slowly making its way down Duval Street.

Tim was still immobile as it passed him. Only a few breaths later and vacationing bodies ducked their heads around lamposts and from behind A-frames. The rooster had moved on. They saw the damage his claws and feathers had left behind: crumpled sheets, overturned tables, trees bent, merchandise all over the place. And there was Tim, wiping the counter down with a rag.

“Can I take your order?” He asked, thinking of California only momentarily before returning focus.

The tourists at the bar visibly relaxed, normalcy restored.

Finally, one said, “I’ll have a cocktail…”