Steven David Justin Sills

“ It was a grassy fringe that went behind the wall and gate that enclosed the actual park. The sprinkling of rain was falling onto him and he could smell the stink of his damp shirt as if the metamorphosis to manhood had made him into the fetid one. Behind the wall he heard the squeaking chains of empty swings being moved slowly in the wind. Cars that infrequently passed the park were unreal and eerie as descending ghosts. No sooner had he awakened than a middle-aged woman in a red jacket rode up beside him on her bicycle. “Fortune teller?” she asked.
“No,” said Jatupon. ”

“ Gabriele was not intrigued with other people since she found herself to be her main subject of interest and wonder. Riding into the depths of herself was oceanic but floating on the rivers of others in conversation was like having to carry the raft half of the time because the river consisted mostly of nothing but sledge and rocks. Many were the years in which she preferred the companionship of herself; and from childhood her eyes became incrementally hard and cold to others. She had to admit that having a hard haughtiness did nothing to make the world into a gentler and more affable place. ”

“ It was the obdurate will of man that feigned reality to begin with and the weathering forces of drowsiness that loosened the elements allowing their essence to scatter like an empty shell smashed and falling through a fist. This was the quintessential truth of or lack of reality. And yet as he was beckoned to return home by ghosts of the past, corpses now resuscitated and moving to the foreground of his brain as if alive and relevant after so much time and so many changes, he was still gravitating forward toward the Laotian. ”

“ As the sun blazes upon the terminal's Scraped concrete The shelved rows of the poor men Hear the sound die on the pavement In a gradual dying echo. A cigarette succumbs to the voice as Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people awaken; And a man spits toward the tire of the bus, But misses. And as he watches his own spit vanish From the hard crest of the world, And silently scrapes his lunch pail against A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale to bleed... ”

“ And yet this demonstrated that the Earth, herself, was alive and full of creative potential. It was this mesmerizing dynamism that most lured his eyes.
The city was fetid as his older brother’s shoes in the back of his girl friend’s car (the car that had brought them here) ; and yet its billboards and tall buildings were opulent. He imagined them glazed in morbidly saffron or vermilion dust the color of a monk’s robe and the color of blood and death. All the pedestrians were individually and rapaciously galvanized but banging against each other less systematically than the ants. ”

“ This memory of the rape played over and over and the monotony exacerbated the thumping. As a living entity, one lived without a clue to the reason of it all. One rose in pain and moved as she was doing now, for how could even a creature of contemplation contemplate without movement away from the sedentary gaze of one specific thing? Did she really contemplate more than others, and were here contemplations more trenchant than others? She assumed so and that it was a mixture of her own genius and her obdurate wish to not be one of the herds. ”

“ Nawin smiled. To merge into a family, to have a home when he except in extraneous matters of documents averring him as proprietor, was homeless, was that which he sought and wanted to hear. But then there were the bodies and the odors that exuded from them, questions as to whether one loved the bodies or the molecules that they emitted, quandries and riddles for a man, that like it or not, stank in multiple forms of neediness fetid as his brothers strewn socks, the scent of monsters that fluttered all about in his brain. ”

“ Shadow-still, Enormous might engulfing over you To the height of The dragline's triple-tank wheels, You see him-- The heels on his leather boots Locked in the train-track grooves of dirt. As he hands the notice to you Its stiffness shakes In your calloused hand. You know that what is left of the day Is becoming cold; and despite the smell Of dirt there is a scent Of watermelon in the damp air, Although you do not know it as that smell Or that there is a smell at all, really. ”

“ Would you visit me in Bangkok?” He spoke with such innocence that the mosquito had to smile bashfully and look away from the awkwardness of knowing that only a child believes that mother and father are extensions of his own body; only a child walks into the forest with a kind stranger where he is bound to a tree, raped and murdered; and only one warped in the wisdom gained in tragedy finds himself inseparably bound by every stern, euphonious truth uttered by a monster. ”

“ The landscape seen from the moving bus was unremarkable but still the beauty that was there dazed him into self-reflections. More than the physical response what did he crave? To be loved and to love was like a dog chasing its tail; and if his tail were long enough he would have it in the mouth. He would have it there in his mouth if the mouth liked the taste of the tail and the tail the feel of the mouth. Foolish as he was going to Seoul once again for his fun, he wasn't a fool. ”

“ Pain sobered one to the injustices and suffering of the masses. But for he who knew the inordinate burden of both there was a twice-fold enlightenment that came to him. It was an emptiness like the vibrations of blowing into a hollow bottle and an ache as eternal as a mortal could know.
The marijuana had numbed his headache so for the most part he could ignore the lifeless aching. It was not all that different than the monotonous chants of Buddhist monks that were broadcast from speakers hanging in tree limbs of certain residential areas of Bangkok. ”

“ He was sedentary in his own guilt for his attempt to murder Kazem, which later led to the best sexual experience he had ever had. Hate and the frenzy of love were rotting the best aspects of him that was so neatly named a soul. Hate and love had been horrible fulminations of neediness that ignited a person into another being, possessed will, and thrust reality into chaos. Sure this release of sexual tension, in the acme of ecstasy, led to Nirvana like any well thrust missile but each intimacy was like a cow that jumped over the moon. ”

“ Gabriele felt as if she were at an amusement park and that her own little world were nothing but a house of mirrors. Each subsequent mirror (despite her youth) cast an impression of more furrowed wrinkles on her forehead, seemed to expand the appearance of bags under her eyes, and made her hair look increasingly gray. Life was nothing but a bottle, a diaper, burping, feeding, and washing. The robotic movements he demanded her to do to take care of him went on perpetually. ”

“ However refreshing this acrimony so unencumbered by Thai-Laotian etiquette was, it was not worth dying for; and so he retreated for a few moments on his bunk until dangling once again with an opened can of beer.
He thought again how this stranger defied the obsequious norm with a refreshing brashness that was like having cold water thrown into his face. But like a fish that was suddenly snagged on a hook, images of himself in poverty, which he did not care to recall, caught him within. His pleasure in the stranger waned as impressions of beings and beings themselves waned. ”

“ Both knew the naturalness of hate in recreating civilization and that destructiveness in society was no different than the kinetic universe as a whole. Both knew that only hope came in recoiling in one’s passive intellectual pursuits. At that time he felt sick like when one hadn’t eaten for days: people who should have been important and salubrious spun around in his head as hollow as all the others. Only his uncle, a man who did not love him and had no particular self-interest in the boy had saved him. Only Noppawan, during his time of mourning, kept him from complete despair. ”

“ He enters the second bus: Its coolness sedating the skin that Overlaps his troubled mind. His thoughts pull together Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning. He feels a little pacified [Come to thyself, human, the refuge from lies!] He knows the shadow's intangible depth: Its vastness having overpowered him these months Until he could not reach the logic that told him To find himself outside its barriers. As he stares out of the window he wonders why she has left. ”

“ They knew that the flaming impetuousness with its smoke cloud of being in love so as to beget children was as brief as the body's ability to replicate. They knew that nothing was more asphyxiating than a passing cloud that they had not breathed in. They knew of no grief worse than a barren existence in which they had not done the mating moves in a timely manner that were part of that illusion for meaning and purpose in their lives. ”

“ Back then the horror, the senselessness, the rape and the slaughtering that were alleged but unproven with the rotting and effacing of time, the acquittal, and the general emptiness carried him off to a horror and disconcerted void worse than death. It was a disconcerted space of months as a walking mannequin with that one keen perception of seeing how the darkness of selfishness and destruction were there in all human pursuits. ”

“ Within life’s physical titillations in this sordid realm through the smell and feel of breath rhythmically sliding onto his nose from the spewing mouth of his mate —a warm soothing wind crossing the hill of his nose; the tactile wearing of another’s skin by touch more luxurious than any silk; merciful orgasmic clemency from logic; the moving of a chest; the heart beat; and yes, the feeling of being in love addictive and sensitive toward another human presence, one’s ideas of life were whitewashed and exhilarated. For him, sex in the shower had annulled his hatred of Kazem. ”

“ Shrieking as they punctured two large holes that made one prodigious gulf in the thin metallic tiles comprising the awning over the swimming pool, they plunged together, splashing into a fiery inferno of loneliness before the last of their inevitable, lethal descent.
He woke, fully startled to find himself in wakefulness. Concentrating on where he was to allow the excesses of the saturation of sleep, a more temporary reality, to be shaken from his sodden neurons like wetness from an animal's fur, he then did nothing further. He merely allowed it to slowly evaporate from consciousness. ”