I am a bomb but I mean you no harm.
That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn’t go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god’s knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery.
The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don’t share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death.
Merry Christmas to you all.
podcast [2:00m]:
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[part of my story covering 24 time zones on christmas day. the title used for this piece on fictionaut, "Grapple", comes from the code name of the 1st british hydrogen bomb programme.]
After some deliberation, he finally settled on an indie called, somewhat obscurely, “Julia, Julienne, Jules And Their Incredibly Indelible Love Affair Between The Sheets Of A Greek Tavern In My Neighbourhood”.
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He finally left the house to get some air. Out on the street, a break dancer was spinning round and round. His xanthous baseball cap lay on the sidewalk like a sacred Tibetan bronze bowl.
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A supermodel, carrying a large Valentine’s box, fell from her considerable, prized height on the ice in front of the grocer’s and stayed down, her long, shapely legs distorted somehow.
Podcast [2:15m]:
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I was like a taxidermist, trying to give the appearance of life to something that was dead inside me. The truth is, of course, I was only scared. But working so hard to describe the unfathomable made me stronger, too.
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February 2, 2010 – 1:37 am
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By flawnt
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Posted in rootedInlove
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Tagged antiquated, asylum, blizzard, conspiracy, crimson, eclectic, epanorthosis, milk wood, periphrastic, pestilence, popsical, savoir-faire, shrinking violet, small pox, taxidermist, tendrils
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Whenever a new sculpture appears like a big friendly giant, the children are the first to claim it by climbing all over it, unsupervised except by the huge eucalyptus trees by the side of the road, who curiously peek over the fence.
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He looks up in the sky and sees a single bird circle. So much space, and yet he imagines it not lonely up there. He wonders if the birds have ghosts, too, and where they go when they’re dead. He wouldn’t mind joining them when the time has come.
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When he died, people wore dark colours and said nice things about him. They played sad music, which he wouldn’t have even liked, and they had his deathmask taken which made him look limp and not like him at all.
Podcast [3:13m]:
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Everybody’s got a voice and even if you kill them you can’t take that voice away. Even the rain flowing down the gutter and on the street and from there into the Yangtze and into the sea, knows that. Our voice goes with the rain to the ocean and touches everyone else.
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The monk bowed to the abbot. The abbot bowed to him. What he wanted, it wasn’t time now to turn to the monastery. His work was on the street, in the villages, with the people, not with Buddha. The monk said he didn’t want to stay.
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