Breadcrumb #48

ROBIN WYATT DUNN

Every corpse I ever loved I found in Bethlehem, down below the darker
tragedies of life is the eternal balm of death, and its milder
horrors, of decay.

Each skull I rap my knuckles on brings luck; each skeletal shield,
helm and sword I've made from the charnel is lucky. I am the luckiest
of men. In my basement. In my saddle. In my village. In my nation.

In my nation all men are equal; the women more so. In my nation we
await death as eagerly as children await ice cream — which is to say,
not at all. We shove it into our mouths.

I eat death with heartache, with resolution, and with force. I eat
death, my balls tucked handily into my trousers, ready to spill out
when the party finally begins, when the dead finally rise, when God
finally shouts us to our feet.

But I know the dead are always rising. And I know God is always
shouting us to our feet. Every morning. Sometimes at night. Or even
crepuscularly.

Crepuscularly I await meaning on the edge of my bone-sword, the same
way Napoleon awaits the moving of the spark to the fuse to the anus of
the cannon.

Like him, I am short, and angry. Like him, I long for death, and the
murders which precede it. Like him, I dream of Corsica like one might
dream of a river, eternal, running under the wood and the stone and
the earth, and running over it too, like it runs over my heart, and my
balls, fluvial love eternal, a river bigger than death, is the one I
dream of. Even when awake I dream of it, when I pop my head out of the
nuclear shelter, to threaten the tourists.

• • •

Breadcrumb #47

RUSS BICKERSTAFF

From all outward appearances, it was the classic image of a kite. It looked exactly like one might expect a kite to look. It was the perfect diamond shape. There was a long tail flowing behind it in the sky it found to inhabit. Perhaps that’s why everyone was looking at it the way everyone was looking at it. Or maybe it was the fact that it was floating along high in the sky untethered to any line. Maybe that was it. Or maybe not.

“Somewhere through some strange alchemy between the wind and the lift and the golden light of the moment, the kite had started to think in the way most people assume that kites don’t.”

     Certainly no one watching could have guessed why it was worth watching. None of them knew that the kite was self-aware. None of them knew that the kite was thinking to itself at that moment. (How could they?) Somewhere through some strange alchemy between the wind and the lift and the golden light of the moment, the kite had started to think in the way most people assume that kites don’t. No one on the ground knew this about the kite. As strangely fantastic as the moment was, there was no one there to observe how truly strange it was, as no one present could read the mind of a kite from this distance. There were a few there who, unbeknownst to themselves, could read the mind of a kite, but only when they were close enough to it to be able to do so. This kite was out of range as all kites with any kind of consciousness are.

     Of course, the kite didn’t exactly know that the people who were watching it were thinking either, so it was just as oblivious to the real miracle of the moment as anyone else. Just like those who could have theoretically read the mind of the kite, the kite could have read the mind of anyone there once it had lifted itself to consciousness. By the time it had gained enough lift to find the right perspective for psychic kite activity, however, it was well out of range of its ability to read anyone else’s mind.

     This sort of thing is happening all the time. We are always encountering things which gain consciousness and the ability to communicate directly without minds. We always end up just out of reach of real connection and communication, though. Sometime’s you’ll get an idea and know that it isn’t yours. It’ll be the distant whisper of something inanimate realizing it can think and then realizing it has something important to communicate to you, but getting far too far away to manage anything more than a vague thought. You might think the thought might be yours but you know it’s not. 

     The kite knew it was in a strange position flying along without a tether, but it didn’t know that the lack of tether was the reason why it was in a strange predicament. It had no other kites in its immediate surrounding to attempt to model itself after, so it thought of the tether it originally had as something of an umbilical structure. It figured that it had probably needed to gestate a bit as a pre-kite before it could surface into the clouds to go off and live the kind of life that kites live once they’ve found their way off of land once and for all.

     The kite met up with a few clouds in the golden twilight as a cool breeze gusted into it, coaxing it along toward the future and all that it held. 

• • •

Breadcrumb #46

GERARD SARNAT

After four decades getting introduced as Dr. Sarnat’s boy,
some pleasure couldn’t be avoided when behind a door hidden
behind a false bookshelf, I heard my solipsistic dick of a dad
referred to as Dr. Sarnat’s father while a secretary shows him around.

Off stride not buried in the turned-out guise of academic research,
perched near my custom-made wormwood bookcase,
slithering through his own distinguished first editions,
after what feels to me like interminable general anesthesia;

Poppy’s SB, MD, MS, DDS & FACS pedigreed eyeballs
reluctantly bob up to puzzle past a futuristic titanium desk
(where I sat) through the one hundred eighty degrees
of picture window Golden Gate wraparound panorama.

Dad’s inner plastic surgeon’s once spellbinding billowy lips
(reconstructed with collagen by a junior partner) now leak
spleen & bile as if from a ruptured gallbladder while squirming
an unpremeditated simplicity: “ Do you diddling do-nothing careerist

internists take these luxe CEO gigs just for the dough — or what, Son?
Observing dueling antiseptic incivilities regressed/unsheathed,
my senior staff dissolve in jellied anxiety. Afterwards they confide
l took Papa’s veiled peace offering like an open rusty switchblade.    

• • •

Breadcrumb #45

MICHELLE HAMMER

• • •

Breadcrumb #44

CHRISTIE DONATO

“You know how it feels when you focus a little too hard on the way your teeth are set? You move your bottom row a little forward, or a little backwards. You try to match up your two rows of teeth, but then it feels all weird and you can’t remember where your teeth are supposed to go anymore.”

     “Not really.”

     “It doesn’t matter. It’s just how I felt the day the sky ripped open and the golden ships came through with…well, we know what they are now, but we didn’t then.”

     “The ships with the raiders.”

     “Yes. They came through almost immediately. I know because I was watching.”

     Judy stopped speaking abruptly and stared over Ana’s shoulder. Judy behaved like everyone Ana had ever met who witnessed the universe split open. A little haunted. A little bit like they would never be the same.

     Ana coughed lightly, and pulled Lily — her small, floppy dog — onto her lap. Her mother had been right about the world beyond their small town in West Virginia. They hadn’t even known what was happening at the time. Some kind of nuclear bomb had wiped out half the town, she’d been told by the adults.

“Some kind of nuclear bomb had wiped out half the town, she’d been told by the adults.”

     “How long did you watch for?” she finally asked.

     “I couldn’t even tell you. Maybe hours. I didn’t know what to do.” Judy made eye contact with Ana once more. “I hid in an alleyway and just stared up. Finally, I worked up the courage to walk home. When I got there the apartment was empty. The lights were all off, and no one had even bothered to lock the door. I remember it was dusk, and there was still just enough light coming in through the gate over our fire escape window in the kitchen that I could at least see where I was going. I waited for them that night because I thought that maybe they were coming back. My dad, at least, would come back for me. I ended up waiting in that apartment for weeks. I thought that they would know I was there. I didn’t dare turn on any lights, or even look out the windows, because I was afraid someone would come and take me away. I don’t know why I thought that, but it seemed like a real threat at the time. Anyway, first I ate all the leftovers in the fridge. Cold. Then I moved on to the snacks and canned goods. Everything cold. My stomach was always upset.”

     “When did you leave?”

     “No one ever came for me. I ran out of food, and I knew I’d have to leave if I wanted to live.”

     “And you did want to live?” Ana prompted.

     “It never occurred to me that I shouldn’t.”

     There was a moment of silence while both girls mulled that over. Ana decided it was a subject best left alone for now.

     “You know why they never came back, don’t you?” Ana asked instead.

     “Yeah,” Judy said, but then shook her head. “I mean, no. I never actually looked for their names on the lists of the deceased. Sometimes I want to, but I can’t tell which scenario I prefer: my parents leaving me to die, or dying themselves.”

       “I don’t think it’s a question of preference. Don’t you want to know the truth?”

       “Does it matter? I don’t think it does. I don’t need to know, definitively, one way or the other. The outcome is the same. My parents are gone, and the world is different now.”

       Ana gripped Lily a little tighter in her arms, afraid she might say something she wouldn’t be able to take back. Judy, meanwhile, was playing with a loose thread in her sweater, twisting the string around her pinky finger over and over again.

       “Do you know how I found this place?” Judy said, as if she were a little bit proud of this bit.

       Ana shook her head.

       “I left the apartment and went to the nearest subway. I spent a little bit of time on the platform, deciding what to do. There were no trains coming, which I figured would be the case. I needed to make sure, though, so I waited and waited. When I was absolutely positive, I sat down on the edge of the platform, with my feet dangling over the tracks. There was a buildup of really smelly, weeks-old garbage. It took everything in me to do it, but I jumped down onto the tracks. I picked a direction and just walked. I think I was trying to just get off the island, but honestly, who knows what I was thinking at the time. It was dark, and there were rats everywhere, but I was alone apart from them. The garbage-rainwater mixture soaked through my shoes and socks as I walked. I could feel it between my toes, and it smelled so bad. I just started to cry.

      “There was something about the trash juice and the dark that was so repulsive that it triggered this strong emotional response in a way that being left alone for weeks hadn’t done. I cried, and walked, and threw up a couple times, and kept walking until David found me. He brought me here.”

      Ana didn’t say anything. Here was the sanctuary for those who had not been successfully removed from Manhattan.

     “Is that what happened where you’re from? With the sky and the evacuations?” Judy asked.

     “No. Not at all,” Ana said.

• • •