Streets follow a map blown of chalk dust. Windows unfold from transparent boxes. A house, when entered, must draw its curtains but the shaven nude, wobbling on its perch, admires spreading palms for a fee, translates their telling creases. Cigarette-burned memoirs rifle with the whistlestop that settles time, once and for all. It was not always like this, no. Peer into breath-fogged glass, shuffle the painted decks. Vagrants, snake-oil salesman, and itinerant magicians with pointed beards are not the fools here nor the lacks, but a collective mind of juggled heads turned back in warning. Upon the stage is the spotlit face where, following a grand soiree, silverwear ticks and swallows. But the last actors turn into the trapdoor leaving their masks behind. Scratched urchins, clattering worn leather, memorize the fall of a dog-eared tarot card, tramping up brick waterfalls for lemon peels. Their eyes swim in tears of fanfare; they threaten with clocks from their pockets. A deliveryman shoves the meat in clamps, quite uneaten in an aroma of slighted passion. The only incomprehensible conflagration – both man and meat – is the revolver in the park, a fizzle of empty smoke. The door slams shut, pronounced broken, its squeaky sign unread. Clutch the fog closer for protection. Draw it into the warm space between your skin and clothes.
Urban Sepia
Louise Norlie's short-short stories and prose experiments have appeared in Mad Hatter's Review, Sein und Werden, Behind the Wainscot, the angler, and rumble.