Breadcrumb #60

PETER SCHRANZ

Unfortunately the blood vessels of this particular animal were not quite blue or red but more like a muddy jungly green which color you and I could never possibly have been warned fairly or squarely about. It isn't anybody's fault, but the moral cloaks over this deer park and everywhere causation persists don't bother discerning accidents from purposefulnesses.

     Just looking at the veins in our kill, who you and I have regrettably discovered too late is more like some sort of a wooden antler-lord, is like hacking through big wet vines and I think I speak for us both when after our slicing through adventitia and media we were shocked not to find intima but instead thick green cords as much belonging in this deer park as those cords twined as we speak around the branches above us.

     It was a shot far, far behind the wind-hissing leaves, but you and I have to kill a thing and bend close over it to see the colors in its veins.

     Believe it or not before the woods close in upon us finally I want to stop your tears because you couldn't have known and being about to die doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad person. There's a green core in the deer park and firing at it was for us not in terms of deserts any more contemptible than had you walked under a tipping tree that flattened you or had lightning struck the canopy and stopped us from finding our way out of an ever-recedingly flameless glade.

     We should be pleased that our fingertips have hiked along so much endothelial overgrowth; few are so lucky as to dip into the warm angiological streams that we have. How harshly can they blame us when we find ourselves finally in that wide and distant chasm for cracking the deer park's core?

     His mouth lolls open and his teeth are covered in bark and you can see the deep green ranine vein under his tongue which has splayed down onto a wet bed of limp, bored-through leaves. The wound in his side does not bleed and does not throb but pours out thick spongy strands with the industry of a desecrated termite mound. His paws don't end in pads or fingers or twigs but anyone could have mistaken what they do end in as any of the three.

The wound in his side does not bleed and does not throb but pours out thick spongy strands with the industry of a desecrated termite mound.

     Your heart has driven your blood 12 thousand miles since this time yesterday but your blood has done nothing wrong and your heart is not a judge.

     As the green veins rise in arches from our quarry's wound and twist between our fingers and toes and as phloem clots our veins and vascular paths cut through us I think it's fair to say that there is no such thing as punishment in this deer park and no such thing as law. The tree that tips or that lightning blows to singed bits has not done anything wrong. The angiologists who kill the wood-lord are made into his ornaments.

• • •

Breadcrumb #59

COLIN RICHARD JAMES

The large boulder rolled
down a man made hill,
just missing an escapee
from the many reasons
for not living at home.
A youngish man typically
inclined to procrastinate, flinched.
This was not one of those times.
He left his shoes behind in
an almost athletic leap,
rolled a good twenty feet
 protecting what he could.
A diminutive figure holding a crowbar
stood silhouetted in the setting sun.
An old girlfriend or
 the new one, it doesn't matter.

• • •

Breadcrumb #58

KIM DIETZ

The sky was orange as the sun set over the carnival. Pink sprouted up from the horizon as a glint of white from the wing of a seagull caught my eye, slowly tempering a landing from the gusty winds to a piling out by the shoreline.

     What was I doing here again?

     The breeze on the Ferris wheel softly blanketed my legs, blowing tufts of loose hair out of my face, while the anxiety beckoned ever so much within my mind. Burnt orange dispersed through the clouds, the smell of popcorn filling the air, and the stickiness of sweat and sugar clinging to the backs of my thighs on this plastic seat urged me to release them from their restless prison.

     And you, looking so distantly away from me. Wishing you were somewhere. I tried not to look. I found you this way so many times recently, falling into deep pitfalls of silence and never fully recovering from the underlying current of our company.

     "What is it that you want me to say?" you remarked when I finally admitted to it.

     And the fact is you do deserve someone so much better than me, but you can't see it for some reason. Only I do.

     "That you forgive me...?" I cautioned with a cheeky half grin.

     "Unbelievable," were the words I had heard you repeat to yourself over the following weeks. Yet still, you never left.

     I think it's finally sunk its way deep within your core, here, at the carnival in the meditation of the sunset, hollowing you out like a flute to be muted by the underbelly of the earth. I can see the reflection of the sky's vibrant colors in your eyes, and wonder if the colors will internalize and cause a channel for your anger to flow outward unto me. I've defeated you, I can tell, and I realize that I've been here before. That I'm doing it again.

I can see the reflection of the sky’s vibrant colors in your eyes, and wonder if the colors will internalize and cause a channel for your anger to flow outward unto me.

     I stare at my fingernails looking for an explanation for you, or the courage to tell you to leave me, but I can't. I'm scared. I attempt to read my future through the lines in my palm, and trace the lines with my thumb until each one crosses, but it just leads me back to the same place where I originally began. I look up midtrace to find you staring at me.

     "Why don't you love me?" you blurt, as soon as the Ferris wheel shuts to a stop. We're overlooking the beach now, and I can tell how easy it's been to use it as a distraction.

     "I have love for you," I explain softly, "but I don't know what I want from anyone right now. What I want from myself..."

     "But you know that you don't want me," you interject sharply. "That's something we can both confirm at this very moment."

     The truth was that I very absolutely could not confirm that.

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