dropCase incipit
Some stories
From Ends—Sorties.
0./”The garden-Goers.”
His is the mod set reveling—in a bed made for cheaper indigo and evil sleeping. I made way down St.-Quince [n.d., etc.] to a place called for one Ed, Jr., who the elder was I didn’t know and nonetheless: Act 1, Scene—enter. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.”
The inn was mad Boxing Day like a white mass for a gin-addled Eden, I’m kidding—
Spotted Sib (called-the-cardinal) sans language. Sez he, “This is one’s called a party, this one’s called ‘can I take your picture’.” Sit-sit.
“You were a scab always,” unlikely to cut but I figure.
“You worry about bruises.” Oh, O. K.
Then this, “for me?”
It’s a simple one, I told him, simple-simple. So-so there’s no need for vowels. Over-and-out between Narrows, there could be a hill, suites for nonverbal altercation.
“Royally.” I didn’t even ask if we were in—and there was yet a sense of hesitation between consonants.
I took the century to grab the vista: it wasn’t so much body as it was landed breast; they were the haunted nudes everywhere; women and others, men and each, two-by-twos among them. Strictly casual adulthood only—colliding eyes glancing shyly.
“This isn’t typical—it? I mean it, this, tonight.”
“Not a place that’s typical.”
Alright.
“Look, I need to tell you this might be the last for a while.” Roulette-mugged.
“What, too hot?”
“No, it’s not. It’s just I’ve got to keep down—things feel…”
“Limbo.”
“The what?”
“Limbo, go on. But, limbo.”
“Something like it. Anyway. It’s all angular.”
“So, you’re not—sure.”
“Sure. I mean, should we be meeting?”
“Here—of all places.”
1./Of Hell.--draggnett.
City-sleepers rank among the lowest of the low without apparent comatose. Ver thought J. L. was one of these; he snored, vindictive. It was his revenge, she thought; his from beyond a night’s tabled grave, the bed; too even, too small, with him and his night-posture.
So she got up, to make a deck-of-cards, as if that’s what she called a nightcap or a glad sandwich. But she didn’t eat and didn’t want to—only taking glassed effervescence. The night was medieval, 0200—0300 hours. Or was it the Crisis of Centuries?
“They tell you not to look at the clock,” J. L., her fiance, had said, she remembered.
“The what?”
“The clock, when you wake up. ‘Time, huh’?” He made a face. He was always making faces, mocking. “At night, you’re not supposed to look. It’s bad for the insomnia.”
“It’s bad.”
Yup. “For the insomnia.”
Oh, O. K.
The minutes wrinkled; and she looked out the window as if it held history or a dream beyond doldrums. Theirs was an apartment on the third storey of a twin-house villa, future-pasts, otherwise TKTK.
She thought of a turtle, one she saw in a nightmare she’d had as recently as two months prior—the turtle was dead, smashed in half or to bits, as if run over by a scofflaw ever-unticketed, or maybe a cruel equestrian kid on a bike somehow; gallantly streaming.
The dream infected vaguely.
2./ Habitual Being
Colin “Column” Volant was above all ageless; he commanded attention if only for his charm which is to say—his utter inability to imagine that which comes after facts.
Death = total compromise.
Volant—pronounced like the second syllable in boatswain, as in—epitaph to a dog, Cool Cool Britannia.
“Not his real name,” said—as if propped on a pure Ottoman, conjecture, inter Alia. Moving darkly as if that verb applied to the adjectival form.
“Your ax?” Beyond basics, absolute values in bed-bath and single pied-a-terre— the army-surplus habit hardly helped matters— and yet anyway he moved—it was for the underscored guerrilla unit, that of self-mastery.
“The radio?”
Sheila had two feet on the dash as if one hand in the glove and the other on the hip weren’t enough and he’d told her, he told her, not to bother or rather to know better, one precluded the other—he told her. Once-over he’d heard of or read of the same: that some girl, some poor barely-legal, once snapped in two that way…
“Why not you?”
“Dial-a-villain.”
“And whose army?”
Yea—and so it was over like finally; she’d finally told Mr — to go wraith fully, to out-Chaplin the unsubtle dead.
“So he’s not…”
“I don’t even want to talk about it.”
A drag from the lit-stick spoke subtle epiphanies—“begotten, not made.”
“Genghis.”
“Genghis?”
His name had been Temujin nobody knew a Genghis before and nobody ever knew a Genghis since he was just Genghis. But that was his element he was a guy who had the skull-and-knuckle to name his own and summon his guts and perform the cesarean all on top. There’s no choice in the real world and no time to take. And yet…
Sheila kept fingering the dial, “’you gonna fuck it?’” He says, like a pale-blue Dennis of Arabia.
I said.
Nothing else but choice, Christ. Country-rock cannibalized contemporary, chopped and slopped anti-urban from the undertakers. The horror.
3./ as-if un-cultured—Detritus.
Sunday so embroidered, there’s heaven only to pay.
And yet. Ver passed alleys like this-way-that and swivel and one-and-two-and-a—
Ever-avoidant, she sang a song—chasing a title always—a mental song. In her head, as if ever in-heart or in-tongue.
There was the house, the ugly—on the other
side, a husband, through which they clutched at a passing
caprice; sixteen-hours-or-more-or-
less-a-day, but then
you love those that
hate, and vice
--versa and only mid-low tears, his elevation, his own,
made the un-glad happy, as if
going back in thought, a desire and an object, whenever
you make it—
Time-blind, she stopped at a zebra-cross-walk, pocket mid-vibrate.
“Seismic. As if I could use a broken wrist…”
But she looked at it in any case.
From: Maybe: J. R.--
Where are
**You
She locked it, bolt and key. No more, no more fucking—no.
No but really. J. R. had established himself as the world’s lousiest prick, all in both the singular and literal and figurative adjectival, whatever—Even though they weren’t a thing, they were, and then they weren’t, as if it even mattered, because things—as defined between subjects—are not things, they are not material, but rather in-spirit, in-sky… Not even in a soul way, because J. R. definitely lacked that very animus, despite parents and heritage and so on and so on.
Even so. Yes, that’s what it had to be. It was a matter of fact and mere precision that they were not the same—and that the thing, “The Entity,” was now a past fiction, but not a big-C, uppercase classic.
Ver made it to work as if that weren’t the morning already—it’s called on-the-clock for a reason, hello. Because the first and last things you see were both a clock no matter what. Whether it ticked or it didn’t and even if it did: time was only a matter-of-fact by way of trains.
It was the trans-continental train that had invented time; railroads. Before that there was no reason for it, no need. Reason meant ratio and ratio belonged to numbers and even then, before the trains, it was only algebra. How long did it take to get from Geneva to Carson City? How about: fuck you. Point to the wrist and I give you a flick-of-it. A friar in the Middle Ages could walk about thirty miles in ten hours. And that was the Middle Ages. They didn’t even know what an hour was.
The lousiest bitch—”horse of the year”—came by. Gaze averted. And yet.
“Good morning…”
Horse of the year.
And that was like a movie, Ver thought.
5./our Favorite Book
“And that’s the most expensive part.”
The guy was like a puddle, I mean, he looked like something out of body horror or something. And he kept repeating it.
It’s an expensive part, expensive.
Expensive?
Expensive.
Column Volant was still over. Shirly—or Jeanie—it was almost like he didn’t care—was having a drag over-and-outside…