After Many Tuesdays

It was never mediocre my dear. You've always been charming—— so charming that I forget to
end things. A knot of the mind; we muse.

Before there was a choice between pillow and plate, there was one lustrous stretch of empty
track. To be careless is to be effortlessly humored. To be careless is to hop a train to anywhere.

A woman wakes to the sound of gunfire in her bedroom. She silences her alarm, trudges grimly
to the bathroom. Today marks the anniversary of her newfound practice in productivity and
gratitude. It begins the night before with a pre-recorded alarm sounding off "rapid gunfire" set to
6:00 am. She no longer needs coffee to begin the day.

A child flies a kite today, but not tomorrow.

It is -6 degrees on the Brown Line tonight. The air nips indiscriminately. Eyelashes freeze over
pale and stream down hoary cheeks. A man dips in and out of the platform heat lamps.

"Y'all doin' it wrong. If you don't start dancing; you're gonna freeze."

He sways slowly around himself, humming something low from the lungs.

Consider five awful things: one is imminent. Ask me how it feels to write at this moment, in this
age. I confess (rather reluctantly) to chasing my own tail. I am thinking of four awful things. Any
car can be a hearse if the accident is bad enough. Between a stitch and a staple there is flesh
and it is crawling. A liar became a writer to become a being with a tail; a tail to be chased. Four
awful things walk into a bar to use the bathroom then leave. Anything is a hearse; the accident
was grand enough.

There is only a time to be scared

It saddens me that you are so still.