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Seeing Red + Feeling Blue
Seeing Red
Dobermans chased him if he left home; a minotaur lunged from his fridge; giant bird-eating spiders crawled across his chest at night. Then he ordered an official gun for mind-monsters. Yet his psyche refused to relent: a high school bully charging, a homeless man approaching, a crying baby from a plane—these, too, wasted away with grim satisfaction. A commercial about hair loss mocked him from his television. Had he ever owned a remote? He shrugged, emptying another round at the display. Sparks flew, filling his room with smoke as he coughed his way into the kitchen. Had he ever owned a phone? Trying the next best thing, he thrust the gun inside his mouth. Strangely, he couldn’t get a dial tone.
Feeling Blue
Her favorite Collie in mid-leap; her last dinner with both parents; being awake in a tiny dorm beside a past lover—holding a frostbitten lantern, she examined memories frozen within thick pillars of ice. A tiny glacier of her father melted: he stood before her, soaked, smiling, alive. She tried this time to say something, but the water began to refreeze—he vanished, white flakes spreading over his body like a spider’s wrapping of a fly. She couldn’t quite place it, but his frozen image seemed diluted. Hadn’t her father always been smiling? What about that scar, fracturing across his chin? Must have always been that way, she sighed, bringing her lantern to another frozen thought.
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