Show Update
Posted 8:26 AM, Sep 29, 2005 |

Here’s an updated show calendar. At some point, shows will get their own thing on the sidebar, and I’ll just update some show calendar, because I know some of you actually use it to, like, make plans and stuff. But for now, here’s the best I can do.

9-29 - Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - The 400 Bar ($12)
9-29 - Arcade Fire - First Avenue ($20)
10-6 - The Fiery Furnaces - Fineline ($13)
10-7 - Dungen - The 400 Bar ($10)
10-7 - The Plastic Constellations - Triple Rock ($6)
10-14 - The Plastic Constellations (w/ Thunderbirds Are Now!) - The Whole Music Club ($5 student, $7)
10-21 - The Decemberists - First Avenue ($16)
10-28 - The Go! Team - First Avenue ($13)
10-29 - Broken Social Scene (w/Feist) ($15)
10-29 - My Morning Jacket - The Quest ($?)
10-30 - The Hold Steady - First Avenue ($13)
11-21 - Super Furry Animals - Fineline Music Cafe ($18)

Note the unfortunate circumstances of many shows on not as many days. This is a problem. The 29th is today, and I’ll be hitting Architecture in Helsinki, which was a tough choice over Sharon Jones, but an easy choice over the expensively sold-out Arcade Fire.

The events of 10-7 are now up in the air. I wager the TPC show on the 14th will be better than the one on the 7th:

1) I hear Thunderbirds are Now! rock, and you can listen to 10 full tracks on their site.

2) The show on the 14th is free (although also alcohol-free).

The Dungen show is going to be a good one at the 400 Bar.

The Hold Steady show probably isn’t happening for me, and unfortunately, neither is the Go! Team.

Bad news for Adam is that the Broken Social Scene show and the My Morning Jacket show are on the same night.
Set Yourself on Fire
Posted 3:24 PM, Sep 28, 2005 |

the last time i set myself
on fire was in the middle
of a rainstorm that arrived
halfway through december.

it was only half an accident,
dragging the lit end of the cigarette
along the paper-thin, frayed hem
of my jacket.

the smoke settled in my beard
like fog in ferns deep in the forest.
it looked like my beard was steaming,
casting itself up, evaporating into the cold dome
of the night.

you pointed at me, your mouth an open
circle of alarm, and for a moment,
i thought my beard was on fire, but
i didn’t smell the same smell, the burning
hair, that i smelled when my father
set himself on fire, all aerosol and polyester mess.

the flame curled its tongues, pink from neon,
around the hem of my jacket. i stood
there, surrounded by the cylinder of heat,
a pillar of warmth smoking and crackling
against the sound of motorcycles churning
their own exhaust into the night.
Curling
Posted 10:46 AM, Sep 28, 2005 |

it only occurred to me last week
that you still had my old apartment
key, tucked somewhere safe. it
makes no difference – i moved
out just as the wallpaper
in the bathroom started peeling. but,
the curl of the plaid paper turned
the room into the inside
of a giant rose, all large, curved
petals, smelling faintly of perfume.
the kitchen wallpaper started to peel
too, and as i shut the door the last time,
the whorls of the unglued paper
looked like fingerprints
on the tarnished brass
of my long-lost apartment key.
Super Furry Animals
Posted 8:13 AM, Sep 28, 2005 |

Get your tickets now. Or later. But before 11-21, when the Super Furry Animals are playing at the Fine Line, with openers Caribou (formerly Manitoba). Yes yes. Tickets are $18, and the show is 18+.
HyperPoem Update
Posted 10:11 PM, Sep 26, 2005 |

HyperPoem has been updated, finally. It’s up to 137 lines in 12 distinct poems.
Six
Posted 10:14 AM, Sep 26, 2005 |

I woke up the next morning feeling like I was hung over. Sunlight was pouring in through the window. I sat up slowly, looked at the clock, and rubbed my eyes. 11:20. I hadn’t slept this late without drinking in a long time. And, unsurprisingly, I was not any closer to resolving my feelings towards Maria’s email.
I pulled the email up on my computer again and read through it slowly. Hundreds of reasons why Maria could need the money rushed through my head, from buying black market organs to getting herself out of prostitution to paying the last of some law school bill or something. But none of these seemed really plausible.
The other thing that didn’t seem plausible was why she would, out of the blue, after almost a year of not communicating, think that I would give her, or even loan her, $15,000. Of course, I was considering it, so maybe it wasn’t as implausible as I wish it were.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and beer made a good companion to soap operas I stared at over lunch. I didn’t really watch them, I just watched the actresses’ mouths move, their eyebrows arch in mock anger and excitement. The volume was on, and the sound was entering my ears, but my brain was still on mute, all curled up inside its turtle shell.

It was cold outside. Really cold. The water droplets in my hair, post-shower towel-dried, froze almost instantly. I tugged a wool cap on over my head, trapping the rising steam. The car sputtered, turned over, turned over again, and then caught, the engine chugging slowly to life, the steering wheel cold even through my gloves. My little Festiva clunked into reverse, shifting gears with an audible thud. I backed out of the apartment lot and began to drive.
I had no idea where I was going, but my Saturday was completely free. I made right turns and left turns, stopped and started, none of it registering. The only thing I could think of was Maria.
I thought back to my dream, to Maria staring at me, talking to me, thinking about me. I knew that, somewhere, near whatever computer on which she composed her email to me, she was thinking about me.

The car slipped into park, warm from driving for an hour, even though I was parking less than three blocks from my apartment. If I were to chart my path on a map, tracing routes with a red pen, I imagine it would be a fractal, each little leg of my drive a perfect replica of my entire drive. I could look closer and closer at my route, zooming in, drawing with a finer and finer pen, and I would see that I had just been repeating myself for miles and miles, for days and months, and ultimately, I hadn’t really gone far, no further than a couple of steps out my front door. Zooming out to look at the map, I imagined it was either in the shape of an enormous, jagged heart or a smooth, curvy, gigantic dollar sign: $.

$7,500 seemed like a lot of money when I filled out the withdrawal slip, but in my hands, it didn’t seem like much. I guess I expected it to fill a suitcase, a briefcase, maybe even just a small shopping bag. I’ve seen too many movies about ransoms, jewel heists, and bank robberies, I guess, because I put the $7,500 in three different jacket pockets and walked out of the bank, feeling heavy, as if I had just eaten a large meal.
The cold had quickly reclaimed the car, settling into the plastic seats, the bumps of the steering wheel, like someone who sees their favorite bar stool abandoned and hurries over to take it. It hadn’t been more than 10 minutes since I’d walked into the bank, and I had $7,500 in my pockets and was freezing. I sat, numb, in the car for a moment before reaching for my pocket and the keys. Of course, all I found was $7,500.
I took the money out, three stacks of bills, and set them on the passenger seat, and for just a moment the thought that, right now, this $7,500 was Maria came over me. I could actually see steam rising off the bills, long threads of vapor changing colors in the afternoon air, changing shades of gray.
Really, if I did decide to send Maria the money, she probably wouldn’t want a bunch of $100 bills. A check, a wire transfer, anything but a bunch of paper money. I’m not sure why I got the bills – I’m not even sure how I got to the bank, really – but I suspect part of it was to have some physical … some physical thing that reminded me of Maria, wherever she was now, instead of last year or three years ago.
And maybe she’d come and pick the bills up. I mean, you can’t possibly mail wads of $100s in the mail, can you?
I Forget the Year
Posted 11:31 PM, Sep 25, 2005 |

we do not want to remember
about each other
the things we each want to forget
about ourselves.

you forget the year i spent drinking,
the warm white oak of the bar
reflecting the wan white blur
of my face, the corners of my drooping
smile.

i forget the year you spent sleeping
with the man wearing the worsted suit,
his horn-rimmed glasses broken
on the sidewalk, my teeth chattering
in the cold winter, a single drop of my
knuckle’s blood like a period in the
snow.

you forget the year i spent as a catholic,
my knees creaking before bed, the annoying
reverence i paid to red wine, the clacking
of rosary beads. i’m not kidding – that really happened.

i forget the year – most of a year – you spent pregnant,
your belly swelling like an otherworldly thing,
then suddenly empty like a pail, filled with rainwater,
kicked over by a wild horse,
clattering against a wooden stable wall.

we forget the years we spent together,
the cold winter creeping in through the window,
the simple traces of the curves of each other,
the slow mortar growth of age.
This Link is for You - No, Not You!
Posted 4:52 PM, Sep 22, 2005 |

Well, maybe it’s for everyone. It’s the Outbursts of Everett True. If you don’t understand, if you are dumbfounded, flabbergasted, or agog, well, then it isn’t for you.
Innumeracy
Posted 2:20 PM, Sep 22, 2005 |

There are few things I like more than people who should know basic facts about math (i.e., everyone) illustrating that they really don’t know anything. This article satisfies me immensely, with a lottery official, Michael Keyser, talking about some recent Powerball numbers being erroneously reported as 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Keyser says such a selection is, “not likely.” Apparently the actual numbers of 3, 28, 34, 35, and 50 were far more likely. If I could figure out which numbers were “likely” to be picked, you think I’d be working here? Huh? Do you?
There are 100 New Things
Posted 8:34 AM, Sep 22, 2005 |

There are 100 new things here. Here are some of them.

1) Here’s a link to the Minnetonka High School Percussion Ensemble performing two tracks, live, from DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing (“Building Steam with a Grain of Salt” and “Changeling”). (Thanks to TMN.) And a link to the arranger/conductor’s stuff.

2) I organized a little bit. Off to the left, I made a section called YoG fustlethrum for all the stuff I’ve been doing on this site that needs to be categorized. This includes:

2a) hyperpoem - This will be updated soon, as soon as I can figure out how to stop typing “hypoerpoem” every time.

2b) fiction in progress - You can call it whatever you like, I will call it a rambling mess. But, whatever you call it, it’ll just be sitting here, waiting for you.

2c) poetry - You know, like fiction but shorter and with accidentally hard returns.

2d) interviews - Also referred to as pretentious post-modern foolishness.

New things numbers 3-100 are hidden on the site like easter eggs, the kind of easter eggs that, when you open them up, actually contain the most adorable, fluffy, little yellow chickens that nip at your finger in an adorable fashion.
Interview One
Posted 7:03 PM, Sep 20, 2005 |

Q: So, why this interview, then? I might, might say that this seems like some postmodern bullshit, where you write an interview with yourself about all this fiction that you’re scared to call a novel. I mean, I might say that.

A: Oh, believe me, I’ve thought you might say that. I didn’t think you really would, but I thought you might.

Q: (drums fingers impatiently on table)

A: (rolls eyes) Okay, but really. Why? I’m not sure. I have some thoughts, most of them grandiose and bizarre. When I came up with the idea, that day, I had read a lot of interviews with interesting people. I like the interview format, all these Qs and As.

Q: So, but this interview is supposed to be about this nov— fiction that you’re writing. So how does it fit into that?

A: Good question. I’m not sure.

Q: Well, is this part of the story? Are you a character, now, in your story?

A: I think it is part of the story. Or at least I think I’d like it to be. I don’t think it would work very well, if I ever put the story in a book, or if anyone sat down to read it from the first sentence to the last, and they kept getting interrupted by these interviews. I don’t think that would work well at all. It would really interrupt the whole, you know, flow of the story.

Q: But.

A: But. But I think, maybe, that this is too pretentious to even bother with.

Q: No, no. It’s fine; go ahead. So are you a character in the story?

A: No. I’m not a character. I’m not going to do anything, I’m not going to go get Barry’s mail, I’m not giving Maria a fucking dime. Those people, they’re all on their own.

Q: So in the end, we find out that you’re the mailman, right?

A:

Q: Okay, then.

A: I’ll tell you what. I can’t even answer that question because I just don’t know. I haven’t planned anything out at all. I hope that isn’t upsetting, but I don’t even know what Maria needs the money for. I also don’t know what the mailman has against Barry, if anything. I don’t even know who the mailman is. The mailman could be Barry’s cantankerous father, except I don’t even know if Barry’s father really is cantankerous.
Cornelius Bear
Posted 9:24 AM, Sep 20, 2005 |

A supremely excellent blog entry from Achewood’s own Cornelius Bear. The best blog entry in quite some time.
Five
Posted 2:18 PM, Sep 19, 2005 |

At first, I didn’t think I’d be able to actually do it. I would take some of his mail and put it out of order in the mail crate, as if I could then “accidentally” forget to deliver it. I would intentionally misplace it. However, each time I delivered the rest of his mail, each day, those misplaced letters would place themselves in the middle of my brain, not leaving until I put the mail where it belonged. So misplacing them and then having to find them later just slowed me down and made me upset at my lack of willpower.
I misplaced mail, off and on, for two months. I’d always eventually deliver it, but by the end of the two months, I’d started to hang on to the misplaced mail for an extra day. It was a little like a time machine; I held on to his mail, and he lived parts of his life a day behind everyone else. He got bills a day later, was always a day behind in finding out about long lost friends’ weddings, and had one less day to decide about credit cards with no interest balance transfers.
The first piece of mail I remember keeping was an envelope addressed to him from an “M. DePaulo.” I kept it in my desk drawer at home, the long, business-sized envelope bulging a little with the pages inside. I didn’t know what the letter said because I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I boiled water on five or six occasions with the intent of steaming the letter open, just in case I wanted to deliver it later, but instead I would just stand there, the letter on the kitchen counter, and watch the water boil away, the key to M. DePaulo’s secret wasting away in the vapor.
Regardless of whether I read the letter or not, I had eliminated half of a conversation from his life. He never heard whatever M. DePaulo had to say. Nobody did. If someone writes a letter that’s never read, have they really said anything at all? If I asked him that question, he’d have to answer in the negative.
So then, weeks later, when I saw another envelope for him from M. DePaulo, when I saw her feminine cursive, the tail on the y in his name, I knew I had to take that one, too. If I erased part of a conversation, but the rest of it still came through loud and clear, the gap of silence would be noticeable, and I didn’t want him to know, at least not yet, that I was editing his life.
I put M. DePaulo’s second letter in the drawer next to the first. The drawer had some other envelopes I had taken from him; I’d expanded to taking postcards, phone bills, even magazines. All the envelopes were still sealed, my desk drawer becoming a box of missed communication. The magazines were in the bathroom, on the back of the toilet, his name on the address label scratched out with a ballpoint pen. The rush I got the first time I scribbled out his name on an issue of Harper’s was different than just stealing his mail. When I stole his mail, I was erasing other people, like M. DePaulo. When I covered up his name on that issue of Harper’s, I was erasing him.
I didn’t steal every issue of Harper’s and I didn’t steal every phone bill. Most mail people get isn’t part of a conversation; it’s more like people are yelling at you and not giving you a chance to respond.
If you’ve been paying attention, if you think through things a little more carefully than I did, at least initially, you’ll see the problem with my tampering already. I should have thought of it sooner, especially with that first phone bill I kept aside. I knew, eventually, that someone would notice. I figured that M. would call him, flustered, upset, maybe even enraged, not understanding why he didn’t answer her letters. She wouldn’t understand, and maybe she’d call him a liar, yelling at him, not understanding how he “couldn’t have gotten” four or five or ten of her letters, and he would try to explain, but how plausible would it seem? They’d compare addresses. M. would read his address slowly over the phone, enunciating each syllable, saying each number clearly, and he would nod and say, “Yes, that’s it,” and she would hang up, furious, slamming the phone on the dining room table, crying.
If I was lucky, if M. was that kind of girl, that’s what would happen, and my experiment would be a success. It’s too bad that I would have no way of knowing how much damage I had caused.
Anniversary
Posted 1:10 PM, Sep 19, 2005 |

This site is now just over a year old.

I have been at my current job for 3 years and 1 day.

Today is the anniversary of many, many things. Think of something in your life that will have an anniversary this week, and then ponder how, with every passing year, we are all one year closer to the grave.
Clap Your Hands Say No!
Posted 8:05 PM, Sep 15, 2005 |

I’d like to admit I screwed up, but I’m pretty sure Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! changed their schedule. But I’ve been wrong before.

In any event, my earlier show schedule was wrong. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! aren’t playing in Minneapolis at all, at least not on this trip through the U.S. Oops.

Clap your hands say oops.
Clap your hands say my mistake.
Clap your hands say that’s disappointing.
John Roberts’ Favorite Movies
Posted 9:58 AM, Sep 15, 2005 |

Legal Eagles
Legally Blonde 2
Barely Legal 14
Herman, the Legal Labrador
Legal Briefs
Judge Judy: Judge-o-rama

Chris Ware
Posted 9:38 AM, Sep 15, 2005 |

The New York Times Magazine is starting a “Funny Pages” section that will include a serialized comic by everyone’s favorite Type A personality, Chris Ware. Details are both here and here.

If you haven’t read Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, oh, I suppose you should. Consider that my ringing endorsement.

Direct all comic geek-dom email about all the details I got wrong in to your recycle bin. I’m not interested. I’m allowed to be a passive, bandwagon comics reader.
Pain
Posted 1:46 PM, Sep 14, 2005 |

So I’ve got this real pain in my neck. That’s not a metaphor or anything. I literally hurt my neck. This morning, I went to see my doctor, who was less than helpful. We talked for a little while about “neck health,” a phrase he actually used. In his defense, though, he did hesitate just for a second before he said it, as if he realized how ridiculous he was about to sound.

I received a sheet of paper with instructions on neck exercised, divided into range of motion exercises and stretching exercises. I wish I had gotten paid to design such a thing.

The instructions are things like:

Hold your hand to your forehead and then turn your head to the left and the right.

Then, below that, there is an accompanying picture, you know, in case you aren’t sure where your head is.

Well, anyway, I don’t know what I expected my doctor to do. Prescribing morphine would have been acceptable.
A Little Too Personal
Posted 9:20 AM, Sep 13, 2005 |

So I re-posted this personal ad for online dating that I had up a while ago. I had made it invisible, but lately boredom/desperation set in (haha for half of that - guess which half) so I turned it on again, no pun intended (again, haha).

In less than a week, this girl that I work with “winked” at me. Now, I suspect that it’s pretty obvious from the photos on my profile that it’s me. I don’t have a beard, but that’s no big deal, it’s still definitely me.

Gr.

I thought the idea with living in a big city is you could do things like post personal ads, visit strip clubs, throw up on streets downtown, and make drunken passes at beautiful women and you’d never see them again.

I should point out that the girl in question is completely pleasant and so on - I don’t mean to give the impression that she’s missing teeth or smells like garlic. But I’m not particularly interested.

Fortunately, this isn’t someone I work with on a regular basis, but someone I email or see once a week or so in the capacity of my job.

I used to think it was cool that the Internet made the world way smaller, that I could end up being friends with someone in California based on a post I once wrote about Liquid Plumr. But damn, the world is too small again. Time to go back to tin cans and string.
Quotes
Posted 1:14 PM, Sep 7, 2005 |

I didn’t look far for these, unfortunately:

“And so many of the people in the [Astrodome] here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” - Barbara Bush

“The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.” - George W. Bush

“It makes no sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that’s seven feet under sea level….It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.” - Dennis Hastert

And lastly, as if we’re all out buying gas and just pumping it onto the pavement, laughing and clapping with glee, the President says, “Americans should be prudent in their use of energy during the course of the next few weeks. Don’t buy gas if you don’t need it.”
Showtime
Posted 9:56 PM, Sep 5, 2005 |

Here’s a calendar, for you local readers, of upcoming shows that should be attended during the next two months.

9-18 - Sufjan Stevens - First Avenue ($12)
9-23 - Andrew Bird - Cedar Cultural Center ($15)
9-24 - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! - The 400 Bar ($10)
9-29 - Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - The 400 Bar ($12)
9-29 - Arcade Fire - First Avenue ($20)
9-29 - Architecture in Helsinki - 7th Street Entry ($10)
10-6 - The Fiery Furnaces - Fineline ($13)
10-21 - The Decemberists - First Avenue ($16)
10-22 - The New Pornographers - First Avenue ($15)
10-28 - The Go! Team - First Avenue ($13)
10-29 - Broken Social Scene - First Avenue (W/Feist) ($15)
10-30 - The Hold Steady - First Avenue ($13)
Stall
Posted 10:38 AM, Sep 2, 2005 |

And then there are times, like when reading Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me, or dooce’s monthly newsletters, that I think I should just use this space to hold a test pattern surfers can use to make sure they are viewing the internet properly, rather than trying to write or post anything that has any real value.

While You Remind Me of Me is slowly building, plot-wise, each chapter has four or five lines or paragraphs or descriptions that just make me pause and re-read them a couple times, not really wanting to go on.
Four
Posted 1:25 PM, Sep 1, 2005 |

To: barrycaptioner@xxxxx.com
From: m_depaulo@xxxx.com
Date: 01/08/05

Subject: what to say?

Barry,

I don’t really know what to say in this email. I’m sorry is the obvious choice. I bet that doesn’t cover it, or make you feel any better.

I don’t think I can ever really explain why I left anymore. Most of those feelings are long gone. I feel it’s like trying to remember the name of my best friend from first grade – I could try and try, and I know it’s important, but it’s faded away.

I guess you probably just want to know the reason I’m writing – I imagine you don’t want to spend any more time thinking about me than you have to. Of course, I need money.

I hope you’re still reading. I don’t know who else to ask, and I know that sounds old and boring and cliché, but it’s the truth. It isn’t something I can ask from my dad; my mother died last May – I guess you didn’t know that, probably. But my dad will definitely want – no, need – to know why I need the money. I’m sure you’ll want to know, but maybe you’ll help me without needing to know.

$15,000.

I don’t need it all now, but I need half of it by the end of June, and the other $7,500 by the end of the year.

Obviously, I can’t tell you why I need the money. So I don’t expect you to even write me back, but like I said, I don’t know who else to turn to.

I think of you every time I turn my television on mute.

Maria

I read the email over and over, feeling all the things that I had been led to believe by television and movies I was supposed to feel: hatred, anger, indignation, curiosity, and, of course, longing. Immediately, I imagined sending Maria $15,000 and her showing up at my door in her leather jacket, a grey sweater, jeans, her black hair on her shoulders like a carefully arranged jungle of delicate vines, and her arms wrapping around my neck. That would be worth $15,000.
Even though she couldn’t, apparently, tell me what the $15,000 was for, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t to buy her back. My heart, though, beat faster, absorbing electrical signals and contracting and expanding like a bicycle air horn, bleating out a call that was either a warning or an invitation.
I realized the wood frame of my desk chair was cutting off the circulation to my legs, so intently was I actually on the edge of my seat. I leaned back, the email staring out from the computer screen. My eyes were tired, my hands were tired, everything was tired. There’s a reason sleep on it is a cliché; clichés come from truth.
I laid back on the bed and pulled the covers over me. My body automatically curled into the shape of a question mark, and I lay against the cool of the pillow for just a moment before the room stopped being.
I awoke to find myself in a small news studio. Lights were hung from the rafters on metal rods; a couple lights stood in the corner on tall stands, their lenses looking awkwardly away as if they were avoiding my glance.
The desk was a giant arc, gently opening towards me. Stacks of papers populated the varnished wood. In the backdrop was a photographic mural of an ocean, an island deep in the distance, barely visible, like through a fog. The lone chair behind the desk was empty but spinning slowly clockwise, as if it had just been abandoned, as if a ghost were sitting in it, idly revolving.
A click behind me caught my attention, and I turned around to see a television flicker on and words start to scroll upward. I read the words, slowly, as they inched along the screen. It only took me four words - Barry, I don’t really – before I knew it was Maria’s email. Just as that thought occurred to me, just as Maria’s name huddled in my brain, I heard her behind me, reading the teleprompter.
She was seated at the desk, looking at me, dressed in her leather jacket, a grey sweater, and jeans. She read her email to me, looking straight at me. I returned her stare but found myself looking through her; it was as if her body were part of the ocean in the mural behind her. Her body turned slightly and it was like the ocean was rippling; the illusion, if it was one, was that her body was actually creating waves.
‘Fifteen thousand dollars,’ was the first phrase I could really focus on. The rest of her reading, I realized, was in my voice, and only inside my head. She was moving her mouth, but she was more like a ventriloquist than a newscaster. Until she got to, ‘Fifteen thousand dollars.’
Her voice was cold.
I lost track of things until she said her name:
Maria.
She disappeared from the chair at the moment her name entered my ear. The chair spun silently, slowly melting into the ocean. The ocean expanded, crawling forward, its breakers curling around the desk’s smooth curve. The desk crumbled as if made of sand, eroding into the hungry water. I looked down at my shoes, my feet, and saw that they were made of sand. Unable to move, I waited for the ocean to lap me up and hold me in its cool, blue embrace.
 
 
 

 
 



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