stars through a screen door

It happened overnight. Or maybe it didn’t; maybe he was too busy counting hours and all the items necessary for a perfect lawn to notice the light sticking around long enough to call dinnertime by sundial. When you arrive back from the north, you can’t not notice it, so short the days had been, and when it happens again, years later, you can’t not notice that you really haven’t changed at all.

This city had never existed without her before, and now he’s left wondering what it’s still doing here.

The snow is glass shredding the tops of bare feet. It can be a metaphor if you’d like but, seriously, that shit cuts deep. The ground ice less so. Staying beneath, it fights against a sole long since calloused and unmoved.

Ok, that was metaphor.

None of this does anything to explain the sandals. But he can’t give them up, the last tenuous connection to a past otherwise forgotten.

Everything can be a metaphor, if you’d like.

From the sky, some of the trees look like eyes of a smile. Maybe we’ve yet to discover life on Mars, but, down here, he always allows the excess water to drip onto his feet, toes exposed between the straps of sandals.

They don’t call him Mickey the Weight because he’s obese; they call him Mickey the weight because he has the ability to turn even the most innocuous conversation into a weighty discussion. They’d call him Mickey the Buzzkill, if Ryan hadn’t killed that guy with the buzz saw back in ‘99.

“Where do you guys want to eat?” asks Skinny Lou.

“How about at Abel’s Cafe, over on the east side? Abel makes a killer omelette.” someone suggests.

“I don’t mind eating at Abel’s as long as you guys are ok with tacitly supporting the east-side gentrification pushing thousands of people from their homes to make room for condos and coffeshops and breakfast cafes.”

Everyone sighs, rolling their eyes.

“Look, I’m not judging anyone,” Mickey the Weight continues, “I just want to make sure we know what our money is supporting. If you think your omelette is worth the social cost, then, sure, let’s go to Abel’s.”

Ok, secretly they call him Mickey the Weight because no one likes him, and he’s fat.

RJ still asks to be called Becky. Or she would, if she was permitted enough time to go out and meet people. She might be 28 or 30 or 35 years old now. If she wasn’t so particular about details the specifics wouldn’t matter, but that’s how she got this job in the first place. The dark secret that The Girl Scouts of America don’t want anyone to know is that SOMEONE has to make those cookies.

And there are a lot of cookies to make.

She still receives a patch for meeting her quotas every now and then. There was a time when she would wear them.

365 things to do in Boston (immediately) before you die (42-46):

42. Pass out on a bench in Boston Common.
43. Wonder why your ears, though covered in snow, no longer feel cold.
44. Gaze quizzically at the blood escaping through the bullet hole in your jacket. Allow the realization to overtake you.
45. Try to jump from the roof to the observation deck of the Prudential Center. Fail.
46. Be thankful you didn’t waste your money on Red Sox tickets.

There are twelve tones in Western Music, starting at A and looping back after G, with sharps for all of them except B and E, and he knows that the easiest way to begin again is to make a list. In the colder lands, the music has its own aura, reinforced by the chill emanating through the glass and the warmth as the tea makes its way through the body, easily envisioned as a marking liquid for some kind of medical scan.

He’s decided to embrace his past, to write what he knows.

If she wasn’t on a plane right now, she probably still wouldn’t be any closer to him. The realization hurts, but he hasn’t written anything in a minor key in years, so at least there’s that.

The train lurches forward, disrupting the luggage he currently shares a seat with.

The letter arrives, surprisingly heavy, the weight of the royal seal engendering a sort of physical pathos.

He’s seen this too many times before; he knows what comes next.

The battles rage across all eight continents, one portly plumber against all the beasts of the world that would dare say he is not fit for her hand, and when, at last he sees her, after all the fire, all the hunger, all the other castles, he falls at the feet of the spiked one.

“Perhaps,” he allows himself to hope, hands plunged into dungaree pockets, “our freedom can be purchased?”

The King of the Koopas sneers. “See, I never understood why you carried those coins with you everywhere. They really don’t seem to be of any value to anyone else.”

The Collective Unconscious has many desires, but only one ultimate goal: that she be known. Jung saw her in the archetypes and dreams, and for this he was granted a legacy.

Katelyn sees her in advertising and smoothies, the pursuit of the Super Berry, different in taste from all others and more potent than any other food, likely discovered in a remote part of earth, far from civilization.

Of course, the humans will never be content that they’ve found the Super Berry, which is reasonable, because it doesn’t exist; the very idea of it is a complete fabrication of the Collective Unconscious, born of equal parts her playfulness and her own pursuits.

Assuming she will one day possess a singular body of her own, the Collective Unconscious resumes pondering new potential names for herself. So far, açai is clearly the frontrunner.

When Czardromon and his army returned, the world called out for heroes, and Zeelander-P answered the call. Every fight ended the same way: giant Japanese latex dinobots fallen, their circuits fried, their eyes a red dimming into eternal night like the jingoism of modern American country music (#zing).

The team was too good, and upon defeat of Czardromon, Zeelander-P found themselves without an enemy to fight.

They picked up guitars but kept the multicolored outfits; some say art is a war fought within oneself, and Zeelander-P knows how to fight a war.

The girl with the glowsticks agrees, though the oversized eyes of the walking pink guitar frighten her, so, for now, she hides in the corner, licking the walls; meanwhile, across the room, a group chants “medium rare”, in unison and unrelentingly.

Michael wanted to believe that all the comic book readings, the scifi novels, that part in Dragonball Z when Trunks came back from the past and realized that he’d created a new timeline, even Leibniz and his silly suggestion,

he’d wanted to believe that the time he gave to these things would prepare him for conversations like tonight’s; that the time he’d given to them wasn’t entirely worthless in this venue.

Still, voices escalate, in tone and volume, and neither can accept that the other (or, given an eager young scifi author, both) might be correct.

“I distinctly remember wearing this dress two years ago, to the Winslow’s 10th anniversary party.” says Amanda, grasping for the zipper.

“No you didn’t,” Michael insists, scanning his iPhoto albums, desperate for evidence; ”you wore the red dress with the gloves that night; the Winslow’s party was before you even had this dress.”

Despite the near shouting, neither is overwhelmingly concerned about what she wore that night, and eventually they’ll agree to just retcon the Winslow’s party to a 50’s theme because someone has to explain how that poodle skirt got in the closet.