OJ pushed some cold squid meat through a hook and cast his line into the desert sand. It fell with a dusty thump beside a retro Phoenix Suns second jersey and startled a napping Charlie Mingus. He sat in his lawn chair. Waiting. OJ struck a match and put it to the map of old Lithuania and watched it burn. He put the buring map to the end of his cigar and drew a deep inhalation. Highways turned to smoke. He looked at the blood-toothed mountains. He tried counting them but his attention shifted to a letter the mountain range seemed to be hinting at.
the letter s
of innocence
lost...
He twitched the rod. The sky was painted with the pastels of late afternoon and a guilty early evening that would not fit on his hand. A melodious rattlesnake slithered through his mind. Then came skeletons dancing a tango and speaking dead languages. He mumbled something he didn't understand.
He felt a tug on his line and began reeling in. A thrashing shape-shifting thing emerged from the sand. OJ strained and brought the shark in.
He apologized and gently removed the hook as the shark waited quite politely. The shark was wearing an immaculate conception. In the inside pocket he had a toy white bronco. The shark sat on the empty sister chair. OJ poured the arizona iced tea. They discussed the origin of the word lascivious. They agreed it was time to play the game.
OJ got into the miniature bronco and roared into the horizon. The sand shark grinned and finished its tea and began to give chase — the taste of human blood lusting through its leathery glove of a body.
xray of judge ito's brain an anchor abandoned in a desert
Later that night, after the shark devoured OJ, the two met again in a dive bar for a glass of gin. They exchanged pleasantries and set a time to play again tomorrow.
A little old man had a dream about a frog eating clams and linguini. Later he was standing in the wind. He had had a little wine. When he was young he did something bad. He picked a butterfly from an aspen tree. He twisted his white mustache. He grew it after his wife died. His father was a soldier in the mafia. The old man's heart was a miniature ferris wheel. The sun's noon nose grew and the old man played with the sun light in his knife blade. He could make a rocking horse. He could bake his bread. He could tie a knot. He could never make a fire with two fish. But he could make a fish from a fire. He would release the fire fish into the river. He was alone. He was a little old man that was a little sad and the sun told him another lie.
The river came by on Tuesdays. Fashionably late. The welfare didn't cash checks before early afternoon. Fish you say. Lovers ride free the old man replied. The sound of children queing for his heart. I brought the ladder. The glue? Yes. The guns? Must we do this everytime? A child squats down and counts the clover.
family blade
the wrestler learns
a headlock