Breadcrumb #63
SAMANTHA JACKSLAND
He awoke to the sound of the kettle whistling. From the upstairs loft, he could hear her moving around the kitchen, opening and closing the cabinets, taking things from the refrigerator, using the appliances. If he craned his neck he could see her bare feet on the hardwood floor, toes painted red and blue for the fourth of July.
Outside, the sun reflected off the surface of the lake. Diamonds danced across the water, reflected off the canoe tied to the dock. Downstairs, she turned on the sink, and the smell of sulfur water rose up to meet him. He watched as she opened the sliding glass door and took a seat at the picnic table on the deck.
“Downstairs, she turned on the sink, and the smell of sulfur water rose up to meet him”
He made the bed, hunched over so as not to hit his head on the low ceilings, a mistake he’d made the night before after too many glasses of wine. Carefully, he climbed down the ladder and crossed the living room, waving at her through the glass before he, too, opened the door and sat across from her on the brown, splintering wood.
She smiled at him, asked how he’d slept.
“Fine,” he told her, and asked what time she’d gotten up. “I can’t believe I didn’t wake up when you climbed down the ladder.”
“I know. We should look to see if a screw is loose.”
“I don’t think repairs are in the renter’s lease.”
She took a sip of her tea and squinted out across the lake. “Maybe we should sleep downstairs tonight.”
“I’ll check the screws.”
He stood and went into the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee. She’d boiled water from the lake and left it on the stovetop to avoid having to drink from the tap. Before they’d realized the condition of it, they’d considered buying the house. She’d always wanted a house on the lake.
“Make enough for two, will you?” she asked, coming in from the sun. She dumped the remainder of her tea into the sink and rinsed the mug with the water from the stove. She turned and leaned on the counter. “What do you want to do today?”
He shrugged. “We could take the canoe out, go see if there’s a place to shore up on that island out there.”
“I have to run into town and get sunscreen. We could go see if there’s a place to get breakfast.”
He looked at her and smiled, then asked her to grab the cream from the fridge. “I’d google it, but I think my battery would die searching for the signal. I can check the scores while we’re in town.”
“I should call my mother.”
They drank their coffee while they dressed, both moving about the downstairs bedroom, the bed still perfectly made, opening and closing the dresser drawers. “Don’t let me forget bug spray too, OK?”
“Get eaten last night?” he asked.
“Alive. I have red bumps everywhere.”
They left the house unlocked when they left.
They found a diner that served breakfast until 10 and ordered more coffee. She got the eggs Benedict, and he the blueberry french toast. While they waited, he checked the scores from last night’s games on his phone, though the service was still excruciatingly slow. She went onto the front porch and called her mother. She told her what had happened. She offered to come pick her up.
She went back inside and sat down as the plates were being delivered. Steam rose off her eggs like mist. He drenched his toast in syrup.
“Is there a general store around here?” she asked the waitress when she came to collect the check. She received directions on a napkin. He got the address just in case they could use their GPS.
As they drove down the river road, through a town that could barely call itself that, she stared out the window, and he straight ahead. He followed the directions she gave him: turn left at the next stop sign, right at the park bench. When they arrived, she ran in and he stayed with the car running, playing with the radio.
Back at the house, after they’d applied a thick layer of sunscreen and bug spray, they went down to the dock and he pulled the canoe in closer. The ropes had been tied tightly, but the long stay in the water had begun to wear down the fibers. He wished he’d known to buy rope from the general store.
They each took an oar and paddled out across the water, he directing them toward the island from the back. He watched as the muscles in her shoulders moved as she rowed, the skin already becoming dark where the sun hit. He thought of the evening, what they would have for dinner to celebrate. He hadn’t seen any other restaurants they could go to. For a moment, he wished they’d stayed in the city, where this anniversary was comfortable. Where there was enough noise and cars and people to distract them both from what this weekend used to mean. He watched as her hair became moist with sweat and stuck to her back like leaves on cars after a rainstorm.
At some point, they both stopped paddling. The island was still far away. It had looked closer from the deck than it actually was. They sat in the middle of the lake, the water softly lapping up against the canoe, and he reached up to touch her shoulder but stopped himself halfway. Not yet, he thought, and leaned back against the stern.
Breadcrumb #62
MATT ALEXANDER
I'm in Vancouver, British Columbia. How I got here I'll never really know. I still have an address in Brooklyn, NY, where my wife and I moved last year. We're from two different countries. Now we live in two different countries.
The marshland floodplain expands. Drifting currents sway gently through sap-lined pine trunks and decomposed maple leaves. Ahead, the riverbanks motion with unspeakable gratitude, bittersweet, enjoined to the drunk swell of an upraised wetlands.
“Drifting currents sway gently through sap-lined pine trunks and decomposed maple leaves.”
War zone.
Huddled under protection of stone, the dusty clamor of steaming trucks file past, carrying explosives, ammunition; the all-potent death of armed men. The sky burns under a 40-degree sun sear, magnifying the light of illusion with the bitter disbelief of guts strewn in the angry heat.
The moonlit fox scatters beyond the floodlit path, and I sit, knowing I'm under the eye of a flagrant bomb pattern, patiently scanning the sky for my fate.
Around the time I turned 18, Rolling Stone magazine ran their famed HST R.I.P. cover story. I removed a copy from the school library, and soon after began to write for a local daily newspaper. I began to make money. I've never looked back.
Down the gravelly road, an older man, built strong and lean, walks assuredly through hell's gate. In this valley, the shadow of death casts invisibly, as omnipotent fear; that cutting vibration that pierces as it electrifies. Every last medieval hell of our wildest imagining is child's play in comparison. The daytime moon fills my mind, obscuring the passion of escape into the dizzying architecture of mythology, roasting in this new Levantine world fire.
The black fly of firebomb death squeals past overhead. I run, sliding my fingers along the combustible river rock, much of it already crumbling into rough sand. My fingers, mysteriously blackened, feel into the stone.
Just this week, I read Djuna Barnes for the first time. The literary world, though often a source of anachronistic despair, is as infinitely intriguing and meaningful to me as it ever was, all the more so from one expatriate to another, even a century away.
A black liquid seethes. Viscous, thick, it's oil. I realize I can't leave. The slick spring beneath the land overpowers my body in a storm of evil lust. I treasure the root of all fleshly worship in this age of fire as the swarm of madness overcomes, and in a blinding instant, a boulder implodes. My exposed hand flits to dust. The earth gives way to pools of ash. I sink in the quicksand of eternal war, condemned to modern night.
He speaks, a guide of the ancient river basin, to reinvigorate the ground with the renewing tides of the planet. She beckons the swallowing of a forgotten landscape. The land is to be reclaimed, indigenous nationhood reinstated over the bi-national divide.
Breadcrumb #61
JULIA ROBINSON
Horace Grant lifted the bottle of clear liquid to his lips and took a swig. He let out a gargled rasp of pain and placed it back on his bedside table. Horace rolled over in his thin, stained sheets, and cussed at the strips of light seeping through the curtains. He reached for his head and rubbed his sunken face with open palms. Something about a dream last night, watching men in hazmat suites raid his neighborhood. He seemed to remember it vaguely, something about a toxic fog. In his old age, falling asleep in front of the TV has left him with strange dreams.
“Fuck this day, and fuck absinthe.” He groaned, and slid himself off the edge of his bed into a pair of filthy brown slippers. Wavering slightly he looked down at his toe, which poked out of a hole in the top of his left loafer.
“Good morning, dear. Now make me some fucking eggs.” He frowned, reached for his bottle, and kissed it.
Horace stumbled down his dark hallway, whose lightbulbs from 1986 still hung grimy and cracked from the peeling ceiling, into the bathroom. Horace ran his calloused hands through thinning white hair, and blew his nose into his shirt before brushing a dwindling set of yellow teeth and shuffling into the kitchen.
In a discolored frying pan he cooks an egg, breaks green fuzz of of a slice of bread, and sits himself in the recliner in front of the TV in the other room. The other room used to be called “the family room” before his whore wife ran off with the damn Chinese mailman.
“Good for you, babe,” he said, raising his bread and egg up to an old wedding photo on the mantel, “Hope 'e wasn' named Jeff Hung for nothin'.” He chucked his breakfast over at the picture and missed, splattering yolk all down the back of the TV.
Grey Fuzz wailed on every channel Horace clicked through on his remote.
64,
65,
66,
67.
The fuzz on the TV growing louder with each click, making him grind his teeth. He smelled something familiar: burning wire. It reminded him of his dream last night, thick red smog that crept over his bed, slithered into his brain through holes in this throat. It reminded him of reverse postnasal drip, and tickled the back of his tongue.
68,
69.
“Fuck it,” he said and let out a wet, strangled cough. His hands fell from his mouth, and Horace looked down to three brown teeth splattered with dark drool.
“What the fu—” he began before retching a wave of black sludge onto his lap. He heaved again, yanking violently on the Slee-P-Boi reclining handle with weak fingers that slipped on the wooden crank. Throwing himself forward, he caught his breath, dripping heavy goo onto the floor. With drunk, shaking knees he stumbled his way to the hallway, grabbing blindly for the doorway. Stinging tears were flooding his eyes, but they too seemed black and heavy. Horace stood, clutching his doorframe for a moment, his breath humid in his lungs. He was going blind. His tears, the same bile that just projected itself from his stomach, were sticking to his eyelashes, swallowing his vision, before trapping him in darkness.
“With drunk, shaking knees he stumbled his way to the hallway, grabbing blindly for the doorway.”
Help, he tried to yell, but his tongue was too thick to get any distinct sound out from his lips. His body gave way, dropping him hard onto the floor chin-first. Trying to use the last of his strength to drag himself toward the front door. He tightened the muscles in his throat and forehead, clawing at the carpet.
Which way is the door? What does the door look like? What am I doing?
It was leaving him, his memory, his mind, it too had purged itself from his body, and Horace was finally and truly alone when he heard it. The front door opened, and a round, pink voice filled the hallow hallway,
“Dad?”
Who is Dad?
“Dad are you sleeping?”
Dad's not home.
“I'm coming in! We have to leave the city, now!”
Come in. I'm hungry.
Horace pulled himself from the floor, his blind eyes stuck open, his broken jaw drooling. He took a heavy step toward the hallway. He clung to the doorframe, waiting for the voice to come closer.
“Dad?” the voice said, feet away, just around the corner.
He lashed out in front of him as the sound of footsteps rounded into the living room. His knuckles cracked around something warm and soft, a neck or a wrist, and fit pulsed frantically under his grip. He thrust himself and the voice into the hallway. He squeezed, and his hand locked in position too easily. The fuzz on the TV screamed in the other room. It screamed until it sounded hoarse and raw in his ears, and he had to beat the sound down with vicious blows to its head.
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.