A Thousand Cuts

Jesse S. Mitchell

There is probably still a Maoist insurgency in Jharkhand.
Rising global temperatures are still probably reducing the world’s green forests to desert by the thousands of acres a day.
There is probably some fatal accident on some Colorado highway, big rig jack knifed, diesel spewing everywhere.
There is probably insurmountable sufferings in every corner of every land.
There is probably someone in Croydon still living some impossible dream.
There is probably no end to it all. 

Dieu de Assassiner (from the Fomorian)

Jesse S. Mitchell

Dieu de Assassiner
On the High line near Gansevoort street I dreamt I saw the black Madonna of Czestochowa appear to me in the rippled dark bark of a tree stump.  I pretended to believe in miracles.
Death Avenue.
There was thick multitudes of birds in the air and in the tree canopies and whole wide expansive tribes of men and beast a’ throng on the boulevard.  I pretended to care about strangers.
Chelsea Historic.
Little clouds of steam that roll under my feet, the buzz of taxis stalled in the street.  Minidress ghosts flutter and appear in the breeze, reflect in the passing panes of glass.  I pretended to believe in god.
West 23rd.
We all wish the stars would come out.  We all wish the sun would drop away.  The sky is too bright and the glare is too much.  We all wish together.  A desire in unison.  I pretended to believe in convergence.
Chelsea Park.
Our skin just gets thicker and thicker and our senses dull dull dull, black-eye the moon, bloody the sun, the sunset, the sunset red.  Until you can’t sleep anymore, burning up from stars and from want of stars and from what of burning.  Roll over.  Pull the curtains.  Dreaming.  

as hieroglyphic as the last (a section from Regnum Machina)

Jesse S. Mitchell

And it isn’t that I am afraid the sky is empty.  Afraid that there are no gods behind the sun and moon, that no angels or demons hide behind the curtain-night lighting and snuffing out the candle-stars of the broad firmament, that the mechanical whirlings, the pulley ropes and sawdust bags, are not manned and meted out, ecclesiastically.
But instead I am worried that all of it is illusionary.  That everything of it is nothing but chemicals and gas, all rising and descending based on weight and density and relative gravities and all just reflecting and distorting light back to my eyes based on angles and exposure to sunlight and starlight, wavering off into cynical night.
No sky at all, not empty, not filled, just gone.

Plato says we are all just staring madly at the works of shadows upon walls.
The continued plausibility of which is dependent on the skill of those who fan the fires.

And wide-mouthed winds howl through the trees and feed further the flicker flames
And make the distorted-shades dance even stranger still
And the more bizarre and more bizarre until the senses are never to be trusted but except for the thick chill all over the skin and the wailing noise that traps the ears.
The eyes.  The eyes.  Are all but lost orbits prismed in by every kind of dishonesty, they pull the mind this way and that way and control the lust of the groping hands but never settle any desire, any doubting doubting doubting…

The shadows on the walls.

And every word that leaves the lips as hieroglyphic as the last, hard and geometric, finding their ways difficult along the curved elliptical lines of comprehension.  Some code.  Some translation that is thought, taken to heart, understood, standing back waiting, approaching the magic that is the communication between two diverse oceans, each lapping at the others shores.  Trouble.  Trying.  A word in edgeways before dying, the breath so dry and labored, every step and every utterance a mystery. Souls. Peeling.  Things. Feeling.  Odd sensations brought about through long enough lives to begin to cobble together sentences out of lost or certainly misplaced words along the way.  Grunts. Moans.  Sighs.  Sighs. A whole life seething in sighs, that the calm is wretched and mistrusted, probably a seedstone of hurricane.  Hum.  Sing.  Sugarcane typhoon.  Nothing else to make much sense.  Nothing more coming through, static, ambiguous the reception.  The ménage a trois that plays silently on the muted television set as memento mori and the housecats curls themselves effortlessly around the houseplants and the blinds were never opened this morning, so there is a dreary cool.
And few shadows on the walls.
It is the hobgoblins in the hemoglobin, the flushes to the cheeks that remember for us that we remain human after all, a swollen tongue and epileptic, a shaken tree with shallow roots.  The kind of thing that soon finds itself out of ground, pushed up and storm-shattered among all the wreckage that makes up history, but to be a ruin or part of a ruin is to be forever if not necessary.  We cut our teeth on that.  Amen.

(a first section of this poem is included in Altpoetics End of Summer Edition 2015 part 1.  altpoetics.wordpress.com)

(intro) to Medea's Videos Pieds-Noir

Jesse S. Mitchell

These are the cemeteries, filled with bodies, all the spirit-nil bodies.
(This is where we keep them).
These are the libraries, the buildings, the houses, filled with books, word-naught books, dead books, stories.
(This is where we keep them).
And these are the stories, bodies, filled with the deceased, letters spent all diseased,  the baffling dead.
(This is where we keep them).
And these are the sandy, dirty sandy shores and banks that we let our oceans wash upon. Carry us.
(This is where we keep them).

Medea's Videos available here

And about the birds in the air (an excerpt from The Hikikomori of Edwin Singer).

Jesse S. Mitchell

from the Hikikomori Of Edwin Singer, included in the book Sri Hinterlands available here
from Oneiros Books

Nothing but the sounds of birds.
Nothing but the buzzing of the bees.

The glimmer glint of rebel-light, like steel in the sun.

The love of collapsing buildings
    And wayward planets that can support no life.
Escaping over sturdy fences into fields so close to barrenness
    That they are called barren, and you can see their barrenness
They are bare-exposed in their nakedness
Worthless except for the space.
The space that they inhabit.

But that is revolutionary
Living in full lux of time.
And when it is Sao Paulo or Sarajevo when we die
Vacant, all cauldron-eyed deep and hollow,
Nothing but a bunch of husk.
And me, as much as you, an uninvited guest,
I will say, the world has begun to turn without us.
Has begun to turn without us.


About the birds in the air…
Horseflies in a cluster on the screen. These are savage times.  It makes me wonder how there are so many of them, woven together, in insectual bunches, their little black legs twisted in with the vinyl string mesh of the storm door window.  It is a marvel to me that anything so small and soft and hopeless survives.  The secret is in their power of flight, or in their numbers, maybe their tenacity…
They usually only congregate like this before a storm.  They get all worked up together and swarm around in clouds.  And they bite.  Suck blood from cattle and horses and people.  Vampiric.
Something about the change in barometric pressure or the humidity, incites them, drives them to this unholy madness.
The air before a storm is particularly sharp, very dynamic and I find that I myself am drawn to it.  I like to go out into it, walk around.  Feel the dark grey change of mist overhead, feel the deep dampening of the air around me, immersed.
It is really the approach that is the magic.  For a while anything could happen, the sky could become anything, electricity everywhere, there is potential.  There is an energetic kind of potential.  And potential is the best thing ever.  The most alive thing ever.
A real thing.
And then the storm finally breaks, tears open that long grey sheet of heaven and bursts out.  The rain starts to fall, stinging and delicate at first., but it tires quickly and soon the long lethargic drops begin to splatter and drip over everything and all is set and all the questions answered.  This is the way things are going to be…and we all sink a little bit further down into the forgetful mud.
The horseflies scatter.
And then an end comes to even that, and the bugs and flies flutter around, all funeral dirges and picking up the pieces.  But soon even all this woefulness ceases and the old moods return and cicadas chant out their mating hum and crickets and spiders nervously rub their legs.
The air gets thin again, lean and empty and clear as glass.  When all the blue finally fades back in, the birds return and begin circling and streaking, each depending on the breed and temperament.  
The sounds of the street begin to pop back out, more prominent now after the low droning hiss of rain.  The air conditioner kicks on, makes a clank in the vents and sends up the cold.  It isn’t really all that hot yet but the A/C unit is old and easily confused by the changes in humidity and evaporation.  A girl rides by on a bicycle, a slow repetitive squeak. Her hair, Scandinavian-straight, picks up the wind a bit as she passes a creeping police car and turns the corner.  She turns onto the road that leads to the western part of town, where they keep the industrial and commercial places. The few factories, a couple of mostly empty professional complexes, the stores, the green behind the community college where they are setting up an outside pavilion for a Tuesday Weld film fest, and finally the lake.  The lake is almost totally round.  And large.  And it was almost always glass-still.  Nothing disturbs the surface.
The lake was also the spot where the last aboriginal peoples of this area stood some land for the final time and were then summarily slaughtered.  Gunned down and left to rot.  That blood is still there, as particularly iron rich soil that supports some of the tallest and sweetest water flowers and grasses anywhere.
The lake is now  a popular local week-end and holiday recreational area.  They have picnic shelters and camper hook-ups and extremely filthy trash cans chained to iron poles stuck in the ground, as if they were in some danger of being taken.
The girl is most likely heading there.
It is depressing the way summer returns to the day after a storm.  It is a kind of boring-heaviness, a weight, a obnoxious mass, a crammed-wet-paper-bag-full kind of weight. A nuclear radiating kind of warm weight.  It is warm but a false warm.  Everything is too bright.  Everything is trying too hard.  But we’ll get over it.
I wish I could write a book with a photo of Simone de Beauvoir on the cover.  I have no such book in mind.  I don’t even know what it could be about, could be about anything really, I just want to write something that would justify the use of such imagery.
I look out the door for some sign of the horseflies.  I watch a few cars roll down the street.  Trees move slightly.  People getting their mail.  I lose focus.
These are the hot blasts of civilization that come creeping into my mind.  Totally unprovoked, I swear.  Uninvited.  Unwelcome.  And the biggest part of everyone of my days is spent running around this house and this life in general, sealing up all the cracks and patching all the holes.  But there is always that little draft.  I must avoid it.
Here is my place in time.  How depressing.  So here I stand, my arms by my side, trapped by time, by gravity, by circumstances beyond my control, by science, by wild random science.  By events.  Best to get used to it.  Best to put the paper down and switch off the television.  Wait it out.
I am a hurricane.  A hurricane is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English as ‘a strong violent wind of with at least level 12 Beaufort scale force’ and the word comes from the Taino word for their god of the storms, Hurakan.  But that’s me, a swirling mass of appendages, mad tentacles of anxiety drunk numb fingers and toes, a clumsy destructive mess.  With an extremely calm core.  Not a thing moves, total stillness.
I am also a misanthrope.  I do not like people.  I think what I dislike most about them is their laziness.  I don’t mean physical laziness, I don’t care how many bales you tote, or hours in your day, I don’t give a shit about so-called ’work’.  I mean, our all over laziness.  How we allow the awfulness of this world to persist and even increase.  How we still perpetuate evil and violence on each other.  How we continue to allow some to go without and how we permit so many to die.  All before our very eyes.
If I ever state this, I usually hear the old line ’but we don’t know any better. ’  But we do.  Have you ever  read a book, watched a film, studied religion, mythology?  We know exactly how to be.  The human story is beautiful.  It is rich and warm and so full of mercy and advancement, it draws even the iron tear.  There is such a promise, such a possibility of what our future could be, as to be so wonderful that it reduce any legend of heaven or hell a dull glint lost in the overgrown weeds.  The end.  We could be so much, it courses through our blood, it invades our imaginations (obliviously) , we breathe its air…but we won’t do it.
But we won’t do it.
And we will blame it on something else.
And we will avoid it and we won’t even talk about it and we will try to never ever think about it
And we certainly won’t look at it or deal with it.
But me either.  I’m not better. I’m no better.
Robert Heinlein said that ‘Sin lies only in the harming of others unnecessarily and all other sins are invented nonsense’.  Yes.  I agree with that.  But we won’t even follow just that one rule.  We cannot stop ourselves.  All we really need do, is never intentionally or  needlessly harm another living thing and we would be golden.  Humankind I could love you again.  I could live side by side with you again.  I could write your stories again.  I would grant you any reputation you wished.  Because we all want reputations.  Saviors. Heroes.  Don’t speak ill of the dead.  Dictators holding whole herds of scholars, dacha bound and restless, with cold gun pressed to warm throat, all to rewrite a little history.  Who is a liberator?  Who is an oppressor?  No one goes to the grave a villain.
Just don’t kill.  Just don’t maim.  Don’t torture.  And don’t let it happen.  Let us move on.  Move us on.  Be happy.  Let everyone born on your watch go to the grave in their natural time and in one piece.  And I will grant you any reputation you desire.  Go out under the stars and breathe your saintly hymns to the moon.  Into churches or alleyways or caves or temples and do your things, I do not care.
But I’m no better of course, of course of course, of course I’m no better either.
I’m no better.
I need to get myself together.
Walk into the other room, turn the computer on, pull open all the curtains. Let a lot of sunlight in.  oddly enough as reclusive as I am, I cannot stand the blinds drawn. I must have the sun. Electric lights are hideous yellow and they buzz.  I can hear the noise everywhere.  I feel it.  Echoing around inside my bony porous skull-head.  It is unnerving.  It reminds me of my cadaverous nature.  I am just a dead body tossed on earth alone for long enough for me to realize it on my own.
I sit down to type.  I wait.  I think in my mind of my characters.  I visualize them.  I put them in situations and I wait.  I wait for them to react, to respond and when they do, I smile because their reply pleases me.  But then it does not.  Because it is not real.  They have done what I wished them to do and not what they would have done.  It is not honest.
My universe is filled with deep thinking individuals in so far as their deep thoughts could only be as deep as mine, with all my limitations but then again, within my world, my thoughts are the deepest thoughts that can be thought.  Yes, they are conscientious, profound beings.  And they are hardly never wrong.  They kill me.
You may say ’why bother?  What from Swann’s Way to Infinite Jest, there is nothing left to say in Modern literature.’  You many say that, and I might even agree.  But I don’t think we are still in the ‘Modern’, ‘post-Modern’, ‘Contemporary’ days.  That all ready happened and our out right refusal to move on is one of the biggest causes our recent malfunctions.
    And then come those moments of perfect stillness.  Too introspective, pushing the brain too far. And our eyes go empty blank and it pours over you like water threatening to drown.  But you don’t, you hover on the verge of breathlessness and compulsion.  Compulsion to gasp for air.  We realize we are alive, we are life, this is life…
And we seem insignificant and we seem sad and we seem lost.  But we get over it, as is our nature, our nature is to survive, to surmount.  We get over it and we move to the next phase, pure delirium.  We shake overtaken with joy and we realize we are alive, we are life, all of this is life and everything is beautiful and wonderful no matter who you are or what you believe.  And there is where the real madness lies, because as it is beautiful and grand, it is also so fleeting and it is so quick and  the rapture pulls away from you, and you find yourself unable to stand it, the quick obliteration and the fading of all the light.
My fingers in front of me, all flesh and bone.  They tremble.  They shake.
It is dangerous to think of characters this way.
And we go rampaging towards an end.
And we go rampaging…
The birds swoop between the power lines outside the house and go streaming up over the neighbor’s roof.
And the horseflies buzz hover in mid-air with the blood lust on their lips.  

Águila

Jesse S. Mitchell

Nothing but a reoccurring dream, a mouth full of steam, the whole end of the world, the collapsing walls, soft, behind her.  The thin skin, frail, around the Earth, cosmic dry and cracking tattered in the margins leaking water and hot air, the undeniable pressure, the unbearable pressure.  Standing in the rain, seething, still breathing.  Her train-depot-core(not heart) waiting to beat, waiting for lights to glare through the aperture, the tunnel tear of the universe shimmering so near, waiting for the platform rumbling, the tumbling trumbling noise. Completely mammalian nothing mechanical, an embodiment of hysteria, a ten-thousand voice quivering timbre shout.
Ayahuasca burning, fire around her eyes, like Saint-Saens, Danse Macabre, bonewhite the moon.
Not all the things humans do on the surface of this planet make sense, or add up to anything.  Some of the things are so very confusing.  And this human was an expert at chaos, our lady of the pandemonium.  She had caught the ever present eye of the whole universe, completely, some time before.  Not all souls abounding are ignored.  In between the pages of cruelty and tragedy, astronomy, something transcendental and the story unfolds and is appreciated.  Not that she ever knew.  Skeptically, she even accepts the possibility of rainless days, totally alone.  Climbing relentlessly over the hard pebbled face of this mountainside, the boulderous waste of hard stone life.  And she has been climbing long, a longtime but not forever  and by the time she reached the altitude, high enough to get noticed, she was already deeply scarred.  A red ribbon of thick imperfectly healed skin chocking round the front radius of her throat, a random assault on the street, from which she was saved by that the tepidness and lack of skill on the part of the monsters of this world.  But not entirely.  The cut was too shallow but the wound was deep.
She is tall. A Patagonian giant with wild pampas grass shooting out of her head, black and thick, a braided cloud.  Scissor legs, sharp bones, tired through and through, cutting their way around the paper thin atmosphere, cured concrete and black mass marble at her feet.  Big eyes but shallow eyes, dilute and hesitant, wavering and rippling, weary eyes from rushing after, looking over, peering through transom windows, checking around corners and in the peep holes of doors.  She rubs them constantly with the bony backs of her hands.
Waiting.  She imagines a bloody rush, a last minute, final hectic fit of violence to end it all, to close the casket down.  Throw herself head long into the path of a racing train, the drum beating, syncopated pulse blasting in her ears, boom, the big explosion.  But she loses interest.  Deep down inside she is too lazy, too stretched out, too masochistic to let herself off so easily.  It is the breathless miserable lingering that remains.  Upward.  She climbs. Upward.
But purely avian inside when she lets it all quiet down.  The eyeless ghosts that pass back and worth around her  body, stoic, the knifeless razors of ugly crowded depots, all the ricketing and tickering.  The dangerous desperation of suffocation.  But when she closes off her senses, totally sensationless, blind and deaf, blank, black, and numb, she becomes all avian, all angel, all eagle and around her grow out the thickest wings, hollow boned and fully feathered.  The warmth and softness, and under these surreal vans she can barely feel coming up the slightest breeze, warm, thermal updrafts.  She knows if she can catch them. She can glide, float away.  No more climbing.  No more labor.  No more cutting.  No more bleeding.  The curses all lifted, just like her, up into the spiraling air.
And all the wars be over, the whole damned world below, warless, deathless, effortless.  And as she spins high above it all, never-ever returning, watching the perfect blue thing move around in the smaller and smaller circles, because she will never land, going higher and higher.  She would go so far out, if she did open her eyes back, she would be seeing into the future.  The days to come.
Her feet hurt.  The pain ricochets from toe to heel to ankle and lightning flashes up the back of her legs, shaking the ligaments and trembling calf bones.  Thighs aching, hips sore, back breaking, the flood of feeling anchoring firmly back into reality.  Frenzy all around, mad din, pushing and shoving and commuting, bleating and daring and darting.
But that is the hurricane and it is death defying and it is maddening but it is only filled with soulless bodies, empty flesh, no power.  Instead most of everything all around is monotony.  She has to fight that, she has to push against it to save her life.  Be a dervish.  Be a wildly excitable atom.  Be heat.  Dip her spear in Chinese Gordon’s blood in Khartoum. Her weak nervous system the infidels.
She can feel the approach.  She can feel the rattle of dead wood and frozen steel, numb but shivering under her blistered feet.  The delay and waiting, the abscess of tedium quivering to eruption.  And then she could hear the chugging sound.  The quiet that spread over the throbbing crowd, the unbearable pressure, the silent blanket, the reoccurring nightmare, the morning ritual.  She could see the ugly wedge shaped faceless mass careening and then slowing.
Whoosh.
Open the doors.  The airs exchange.  The outside natural and humid air fights its way into the carriages and the inside parched and inelegant stuff rushes out in hisses.  The result is a gigantic empathic mist that envelops.  A fine esoteric haze.  A vapor that surrounds her as she boards the train and with every further step inside, she loses more and more of her mind until the awful beast struggles and jumps to life again and begins rolling steadily down the tracks.
As the lights and signs go whipping by the small stained windows and everything becomes a bewitching blur, she starts to see a thousand little twinkles of quaking light all around her.  It feels weightless below her.  She feels lifted up, high up, something purely bird-like.  The steel train cars that she inhibits sway and swerve, squirming serpentine.  She puts her hand on the wall for support.  Everyone else is gone.  Disappeared.  A great giant snake snatched off the cold rocky surface of a rock, clutched in the scaly warm talons of a busting upward eagle, a daze of light and a cyclonic fire of wind around her.  And she doesn’t hurt.  And nothing on her is sore.  All the sameness is evaporated, the ennui lifted like a scrim.  She kicks off her shoes and she imagines they fall forever through a superheated atmosphere.
And she smiles.
And that is how the Eagle saw the end of the world in Veracruz.

Slumber (an excerpt from 'Medea's Videos')

Jesse S. Mitchell

the following is an excerpt from the novel, Medea's Videos.  It is available for purchase from Oneiros books here Medea's Videos

She lets her heavy eyelids smother over her big sore eyes.  And her mind goes, palisades and pineland wastes and punk rock pictographs.  Past Passaic, past Passaic, past Passaic, beyond the Styx, beyond the Lethe, to dreaming dream oblivion.  Just try to make it all work.  The most mysterious of all mysteries, may we all have hallucinary dreams, descriptions of love or fantasy, depictions of exorcism or orgasm or something alike but in-between, something narcotic, neurotic, narcoleptic.
And then she is in an empty field, a giant sky.  A sky so grey not even fire could scorch it black, so grey lightning couldn’t even flash it bright.  So grey.  She moves her eyes.
And then it all rolls away.
And the green grass, turning crude yellow at the tips, covering over everything at her feet, was suddenly illuminated.
And the tall red grass next to her, rusted through with late season maroon and crimson, swayed.  She put her hand in it, touched the tops of it as she walked slowly through the field, over a small hill, toward the big red barn as it became more and more visible.  A flock of small black birds bust into the air, starlings.  The ripple rustle of their wings, the deep shadow they cast over the ground.
Can’t think too much.
No words forming in the mind.
Vacant.
Vacantness.
Quiet.
Peace.
She began to feel a bit sick, dizzy.  Couldn’t keep her feet.  Felt unstable.  Tumbling.
Her eyes opened.  She was lying sweaty on her bed.  Ran her hands over her face.  Sat up in bed.  Still unaccustomed to, but becoming more so everyday, to the violence of tearing between two realities, just by opening or closing your eyes.  Jarring.
Heaves herself off the bed, stumbles, feet of dead brick, slowly to the bathroom.  Showers. So much steam.  Lights a cigarette and watches the smoke mix with the evaporating moisture, the humid air.  Wipes off the mirror and stares at her face, pulls on her eyes, eyelids, cheeks, cigarette perched on her lips.  Combs her hair back and up.  Grabs an oversized white t-shirt off a teetering pile near the door and yanks it over her head.  The words on the shirt ‘Black Flag’ appear backward in the mirror but she can still read them. When she notices that fact her mind turns for a moment to philosophy, physics, same as with anyone else who happens upon the phenomenon.  But as with everyone else, she quickly forgets.  She tugs on a pair of dark indigo jeans, flicks her cigarette in the sink.  Turns the water on to wash the ash down the drain.
Walks into the other room, picks her jacket up off the floor, puts her arms through carefully.  Snubs out the butt and tosses it in an old coffee can.  Grabs an iPod off the counter, twists the headphones, wires, around it slips in a pocket.  Takes a small camera off the shelf and puts it in another pocket.  Pack of cigarettes, lights, keys.  Next to the refrigerator, she slides her back and brings out a pint bottle of vodka, she drops it in a hidden inside pocket.
Opens her door to the outside world.  Pauses for a moment, shudders, a kind of prayer on her lips, just don’t be terrible today, just don’t be cruel, don’t be awful, shakes her head and closes the door hard.
Out on the streets, it is all zombie-eyed dawn, glassy, glazed over staring down the barrel of a gun, all bloodshot throbbing veins around the horizon.  Loud, screeching, bleating noise, deafening, throwing punches at the sky, a hundred thousand million people with scissor legs cutting, slicing, daring someone to do their worst.  Belligerent.  Ugly.    
The syncopated caffeinated rhythm. The merciless pulse.   That vindictive speed.  It will get you.  It will get you.
Murder.
She jams her earbuds in her ears, moves them, repositions them.  Her ears get irritated, flushed.  “Passing Complexion” plays, Steve Albini’s electric chainsaw buzz.
She dodges as many bodies as she can.  Dancing through the thick warm tide of pedestrians, waves, crescendos, arpeggios.  Too much distance between anywhere she is and where she means to be.  She can feel the sun trickling down from out the stingy sky, clogged this morning with clouds and long fascist wisps of dark atmosphere.  Another warm day.  Another killer day.  
And in the middle of this wasteland, in the midst of all of this indifference decay, a peak, a mountain top.  A sanctuary.
A square Plexiglas booth.
A bus stop.  With a long composite plastic bench.  The bench is empty except for one blonde head, slumped down, peering into a book lazily cracked in one hand.  A big thick manila folder resting on her lap.
Medea walks into the booth and sits down, rips the earbuds out of her ears, grimaces at the slight sting. Turns off the iPod and shoves it in her pocket.
Lindsay looks up from her book and smiles.
“Get the part?”
“Fuck no.”
“Why not?  Did you listen to the others?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you read well?”
“Yeah.  The best.  I was the best for the part.  I know it.”
“These things happen.”
“You got the band posters done?”  Medea reaches down and taps the folder.
“Yeah.  Last night.  Taking them over to get them approved right now.  If they like them, then it is a go.  Get a little bit of money out of the deal and we get to go to a free show.”
Medea nods.
“What did you do last night?”
“Ended up getting too stoned, passed out at some point.  Living the dream.”
“Hm.”
They sat together looking forward at nothing for a few seconds, silence, there weren’t even any sounds leaking in from the city.  Nothing.  A perfect vacuum of noise.
“I think I dreamed I was in some underwater world, filled with Roman ruins and shit, picking up bits of gold and treasure.  At some point I had to fight with mermaids…or something.”
“How very Wagnerian.”
“Yeah.”
Medea took the pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and slammed against her palm a few times, pulled the cellophane strip away and opened the box, yanked out the foil and tossed it on the ground.  She watched float away on the breeze for a few minutes and finally in fell and rolled next to an old dilapidated trash can.
“Oh! You are such a litterbug.”
“Yeah, all us Nihilists are.  The planet can take care of itself.”
She puts a cigarette in her mouth and lights it.  She leans forward and rests her elbows on her knees.  She takes a drag and fills the booth with smoke.
“So, you coming by tonight?”
“Yeah.  I’ll be there.  I have my thing.”
Lindsay interrupts her, “What thing?”
Medea waves her left hand at her, trying to blow her off, “My thing, you know.  I’ll be there after that around six, I guess.”
Lindsay nods, “Cool, we can finish watching ‘The Planet Earth’ box set.”
“Urrghh!” Medea sits up and sloughs in the seat, “No, I can’t stand it.  We have to watch something else.”
Lindsay laughs a bit.
“Every time we watch that, I spend the next two days hearing David Attenborough narrate everything I see.”  She sits straight up and with a fake upper class British accent, “The homeless American Vietnam vet does the MOST remarkable thing, in his shopping cart filled with jugs of urine, he keeps an entire change of clothes and two full brown paper bags of loose chicken bones.  A master of organization, he can accumulate great masses of strange and bizarre trinkets and talismans.”
Lindsay laughs.
“It’s too much, man.  I cannot take another night of nature documentaries . Do you want me to bring something myself?  I can run back by my place and get something good, I swear.”
Still laughing a bit, “Sure.  Sure.  That’s fine.”
As the words leave her lips, a bus begins to chug to stop and the folding door creeks open.  Air brakes breathe out in a gust.
“That’s me. See you later, okay.”
Lindsay stands up and collects her book and folder and a bag at her feet, under her shoulder.
Medea nods and slumps forward again, smoking.
As soon as Lindsay walks on the bus and down the aisle to her seat or nonexistence, one or the other, Medea reaches inside her jacket and twists the lid off her pint bottle, eases it out of pocket and takes a hard slug.  Caps it back up and stands up and smoothes down her clothes.  And leaves the bus stop booth and continues her way through the streets toward her destination.