It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over

It is not precisely accurate to say that nothing has changed. It’s all farther along. And it is quieter. And the quiet is emptier. At night, walking the streets, it is especially noticeable. You can hear things settling, the way an old house settles. Creaking and popping. Some buildings are tilting into the fill on which they were built. Walls buck

“I think grief is a time machine.”

“But your name isn’t Carlos,” I say. “Carlos is the name I have given my name,” he says. “You seem like a Carlos,” I say.

When I was little and my mom was working at the corral, I spent all day as a horse. I ate molasses covered oats from the grain bin. I drank from the water troughs. When I ran I was galloping. I’d look along the edge of the forest for two sticks just the right length and hold them in my hands for front legs. The sticks helped me see myself, feel mys

We are just like the living. Hunger is only ravenous hope.

That’s another thing—most of us can’t remember who we are…were…are. We are character actors to ourselves—people we recognize but can’t name.

A hotel might once have been a metaphor for the body, for purgatory, for any transitory site. Muffled hallways. The repeating pattern of low-pile carpet. Sconce lighting. Echoing emergency stairwells that smell vaguely familiar. The sound of doors closing. Plastic ice buckets. Theft-proof hangers without hooks. Drawers no one ever uses. Perfect. An

“We all arrived here from the same place.” He gestures around at the walls, the windows. “We came here from life. A bleak and aimless world of uncertainty and self-delusion, of violence cloaked in compassion, of greed masquerading as order. A world of ranks and classes and races. Life. A world consumed by fear. A terrible world whose only consolati

I was thinking about golems. I was thinking that I am like a golem. I feel more like earth now than like an animal. Mud and sticks and rags that look and act something like a live thing. And I thought: But really I’m more like an owl pellet. A boney, furry, coughed-up turd that walks and talks. But then it wasn’t just a joke to myself. It became an