Nine-Hundred Luv-Talk
by Aaron Case

ALEX was maybe two the first time I saw him use a telephone. We were in my parents bedroom, all taking turns talking to my father who was in Frankfurt, Germany. Not for any Germanic reason, but because that was his job.
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Our man Dutch hated Missouri, but at least the weather, he thought, was warm enough. He stretched his arm out the short and narrow, concrete window; his slim, double-jointed elbow rocked backwards a bit to catch just a little of the sunset that couldn’t leak into his cell. He let his gaze saunter over the haunting stretch of orange sky outside. All that could be seen of the land was in his imagination. Missouri was there in some abstract form lying beyond a weave of metal fences and one very high and very thick wall. Prisons within prisons.

It's Williamsburg, the height of wedding season. Chaya hasn't been there in years, except for the occasional trip to visit to her mother. She, like most of the Jews, moved on to bigger and better things, like expensive cars, flashy jewelry, and big houses on Bedford Avenue. She remembers watching the shootings from the window of the apartment on Roebling, remembers her mother being attacked in the hallway on the way home from work, and in remembering all of this she's glad it's all behind her.

I was splattered on the walls and soaked into the carpet. I felt like a worm in a compost heap in hell. Everything was Slayer red and there was someone standing over me wearing a goat mask, and there was a kind of stygian fog coming off of the mask. There was no way to get a handle on the visage – it morphed evilly, by turns mocking, sensual, atramentous.

On my way to search a lost kingdom's home,
ramblers in a torch-buttered tavern
say that while the king slept,
the archers on the walls forgot about whetstones,