They began on the porch.  My daughter saw them first and she said they came in all sizes and they were goats, but my son said no they were deer, perfectly formed deer who had come in from the forests and their coats were immaculately clean pelts of Irish setters but they were certainly not dogs, and I wondered what happened to my son’s and daughter’s eyes, because I could see they were horses, and possibly Egyptian animal deities of revenge and resurrection, and I wondered why these live statues had settled here on our porch in days and nights of dark war in far continents, live gods in our house in 1942 when our people were also contending; and while we were descending the porch the animals we just spotted vanished yet we were all now in the sloping fields, family and many more animals or maybe deities, and we were walking slowly up these meadows of grass and wildflowers, and I was frightened, not of the still horses who were certainly figures of grace but of my own body, because suddenly they took all the juice out of me...

by Ruxandra Cesereanu
translated from the Romanian by ALISTAIR  BLYTH


The men a woman twists around in words are post-males. As a rule, all that is left of them is flayed skin laid out to dry. But sometimes they leave behind visions, phantasms, sensations and emotions.

The man of whom I shall write at the beginning of this series of men of every variety was a cat. Many people might think he was a tomcat, but no, he was a green cat, with piercing eyes and a well-trimmed bushy moustache. A hussar-cat, with strange desires, about which he once told me, as we were sitting on the steps of a pavilion. He had a warm voice, albeit rugose from tobacco, a colonel’s voice, half Prussian, half Polish. He was a short man, striding softly or even slightly swaying, his eyes a little inflamed by alcohol, like a merry frog. That was why I liked him: he was both a cat and a frog.

by Herbert Huncke

I just finished eating Peter and washed him down with beer--lager beer.  He was tender and juicy--succulent--sugar cured and lean.

I swallowed his heart whole.  Sucked his bones clean--leaving them in a pile--neatly stacked--marrowless.

Of his hair I’ll weave a silken jerkin--a scarf--to wrap around my throat and a sash.

Of his bones I’ll build a bed--spend hours lying upon it--dreaming --his skull a pillow for my head--the birds will come there and find me dead.

They will peck me tearing tiny morsels of flesh.  Some will fly away--dropping me into the sea--for fish.  The sun will dry me out and the wind scatter flakes of dust over the earth.

Slowly our bones will pulverize as we gradually become powdery-- the rain blending us together--washed across the earth in tiny rivulets--seeping down to the roots of the trees--grass--flowers.

They will find our skulls--the last to go--clasped jaw to jaw--in caricature of a kiss.

When I come home, there are six police cars outside. Things will be out in the open, now. I am 15, and I have not enjoyed clarinet practice today, because, let’s face it, I will never be a Benny Goodman, and in my family it’s all or nothing.

Mom is applying lipstick in the bedroom when Dad finds something wrong with her. She’s mulling over breakfast, maybe thinking the scrambled eggs turned out too soft. He likes them firm. He notices a drifty, thoughtful expression in her eyes, so he picks up the nearest thing and smashes her face with the phone. There’s a sickening crunch, and her teeth ping off the glass top of the vanity. Her mouth is open and red is streaming out, and he’s afraid he’ll be burned, so he gets a hammer and bashes her skull. She’s lying across the vanity, her lipsticks toppled over like toy soldiers, and he’s about to finish her off when he notices my brother in the door. My 14-year-old brother has broken into his parents’ bedroom, and my father hears the “uh oh” voice in his head and runs.

By the time I get home, my father’s sisters are outside, and they say, “Madeleine, you don’t want to go in the house.” But I do. I want to remember where I come from. They drive me to a Burger King where my brother is waiting, and I sit across from him and look into his large, brown eyes, which are the same shape and color as our father’s. They seem to be slipping down his face, and I want to catch them like little fish. I want to lick the ketchup off his top lip, which looks gory and clownish. “Someday we’ll laugh about this,” I say, because laughing is what we do when we don’t know what to say. We laugh out of embarrassment and because extravagance is our inheritance.

“I can laugh about it, now,” my brother says, the corners of his mouth curling up. “I mean, we live in a big house and go to a nice, quiet school, but our father tried to kill our mother, and he almost got it done. Nothing happened to set him off. It was a normal day.”

The men and women go searching, hunting for the great ornament, the perfect page of appearance, the photo, the product, the celebrity link. They hunt in the lit-up social networking space for a form which by its form alone, without diamond blazons or flashing chains of circumstance, by its form alone, by being right, becomes the perfect stone, the essential attracting element they seek.

Walking in the street after going out for a drink with her friends at night she saw strange unpleasant men lurking in the shadow spaces between the dark buildings. They looked at her.  She looked away. Then when she had passed the men and was crossing at the stoplight with her friends she turned and looked back over her shoulder anxiously.  And then looked back again, as she reached the other side of the street. The men said, What are you looking at?

I’m going to show you something I’ve never shown anyone before.  Not even my agent. In fact, Lolly would freak if she knew I was doing this.  I can hear her: “You’re going to destroy it for them, Paul.  You’re going to turn their tongues sour.  You know, the tongue of their brains?  They don’t need to know what you cut.  What you cut stays in the trash.”  I appreciate her theatrical sense of maintaining appearances, sticking to character, not letting one see the blemish on your cheek or the cut in your heel or the gash in your soul.  Chin up.  Face front.  Pull curtain.  Act one.  But I can’t help it.  Now that it’s over.  All of it.  Besides, it’s only a page.  Less.  343 words.  But these are the 343 words that started everything.

They began on the porch.  My daughter saw them first and she said they came in all sizes and they were goats, but my son said no they were deer, perfectly formed deer who had come in from the forests and their coats were immaculately clean pelts of Irish setters but they were certainly not dogs, and I wondered what happened to my son’s and daughter’s eyes, because I could see they were horses, and possibly Egyptian animal deities of revenge and resurrection, and I wondered why these live statues had settled here on our porch in days and nights of dark war in far continents, live gods in our house in 1942 when our people were also contending; and while we were descending the porch the animals we just spotted vanished yet we were all now in the sloping fields, family and many more animals or maybe deities, and we were walking slowly up these meadows of grass and wildflowers, and I was frightened...

The seizures I'd been having wore down my neck muscles with stretching.  I was inside a living room, somewhere in an apartment I didn’t recognize other than smell, and my roommate, again alive, next to me on a couch.  Across from us another couch with an anorexic woman petting a large black dog.  The dog was over a hundred pounds and had gray hairs along its mouth.  Its hands resembled human hands, with long claw nails, them clear and gripping the side of the couch.  

The anorexic woman stared at us.

She said—I am an anorexic bitch.  Which one of you will fuck me—She said.

My roommate said—We didn’t come to fuck we came to watch you die.

She petted her dog, staring.

I want to show you what he can do—The anorexic bitch said.

She reached into the couch and retrieved a tennis ball and then threw the tennis ball on the ground, and the ground was see through, to the sidewalk below, eyeless fish swimming over and around dying plant life.  The large black dog got off the couch and lay by the tennis ball, chewing it.  

The anorexic bitch said—He does that for hours, it hypnotizes him.