Microfiction Monday – 72nd Edition
Yellow
by Jake Woods
The solitary dandelion grips life in the midst of this asphalt prison, growing sideways out of the curb like an intrepid, windswept conifer rooted to a concrete mountainside. The shade of yellow is not unlike the solid yellow line, arrow straight, that leads to freedom, or the fiery yellow orb that holds me captive. The wizened panhandler with scraggly beard, shuffles, yellow eyes downcast, defeated. Hope: yellow flower; yellow eyes. As I ponder, he stops, peers at the flower, considers. He staggers a bit as he opens his fly, and I look away as he pisses on my yellow daydream.
Clairvoyance
by JJ Collins
Far from home, away from his wife and kids, Harvey McGarvin decided to die.
It wasn’t quite as simple as that; no, Harvey loved his family very much. But Harvey had a secret, and secrets eventually flee the hearts of the impulsive.
Harvey could see the future.
Angst and worry consumed him, robbed him of sleep and forced him along a path he once believed to be his own. Finally, under the weight of false autonomy, he rode his motorcycle deep into the Nevada desert, and put a pistol in his mouth.
As he’d always known he would.
Buzzards
by Mark Burnash
As long as you blinkin’, they’ll leave ya ‘lone. Oh they’ll hangout and they’ll circle around, but as long as they see dem eyelids keep comin’ up, they’ll jus’ wait. And you MAKE ’em wait! You hear? Don’t be givin’ them sons of bitches an easy meal. Make ’em EARN their dinner; make ’em wonder if they jus’ wasting their time. They just might be. If you strong enough to throw a rock, try’n kill one of dem bastards, but whatever you do keep them eyes BLINKIN’, so-as even if they git ye, you be more trouble than you worth.
Apocalypse
by Ethelia Pope
Water has become dark and viscous, slithering serpentine through streets, expanding, impeding. Daily hustle and hurry is stolen, compressed into infinitesimal spaces. Never sunlight, never air to breathe deep enough into lungs to satisfy. The whole world is shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow on shrinking islands, looking skyward at the haze.
Microfiction Monday – 71st Edition
This week’s artwork is by Julian Cloran
Ennui
by Sue Powers
Listless, languid, eyelids heavy in empathy, food called out to her, insistent, nagging, moving her to pull out lemon bars, Häagen Dazs, mozzarella cheese, sourdough bread, a leftover vegetable curry and rice entrée now five days old and her secret stash of brownies, and wash it down with a diet cola and her bottle of save-for-an-occasion Riesling. Wiping the last crumb from her chin, she laid her head onto the table, belly painfully extended, bile rising to her throat, and still, had there been any thing left, her emptiness would have devoured it.
If Turkeys Could Talk
by C. F. Carter
When you approach her house and I try to warn you, you hear only warbles and honks.
You ignore me when I bend my wing towards the barn, where cars rust in the darkness.
When I try to lead you to the well where badges soak in its cold depths, you push me aside with a shiny jackboot.
Like a strutting tom, you ring the bell, and a heartbeat later she shoos you off the porch.
She scatters cracked corn in the yard, while you beat your wings and kick up dust, erasing what I’d scratched in the ground: witch.
Drunk Mothers
by Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri
She asked her son to take her to the liquor store. Again. She hated the look in his eyes, eager to please. As if this could patch everything together. She always lost her temper, passed out. Her career as a pianist had fallen flat. She felt a mélange of anxiety and rage, the sense of something valuable taken. “I’ll take you,” he said. She felt gratitude. Anger. She wanted him to resist and oblige. She wanted him to take her, she wanted him to hide the keys. She wanted him to leave. Run fast. “Let’s go,” was all she said.
Tomatoes
by Daryl Scroggins
Don’t go, she thought, her face pressed to the door she had closed against him. She imagined him walking down toward the road, his new car by the mailbox. She saw herself opening the door—saw him turning to her, unable to go on, starting back.
But she didn’t open the door. She went to the kitchen and got ice for her eye. Poured herself a glass of water. She saw, then, the brown bag of tomatoes she had selected for him from her garden. But when she glanced through the peephole again, everything just looked round, like a road.
What is Death Like?
by Xavier Barzey
A German cockroach lay stiff on its back as its mesothoracic legs flickered in slow motion on the front porch. “What is death like?” she asks intently with an innocent gleam in her little eye. I looked at her, uncertain of what to say. I reflected for a moment, “uh… well, I suppose it may hurt at first, but then you begin to transcend beyond the present and soon you’ll feel nothing.” Perplexed, she cupped her hands around the roach and stroked it softly on its back. It lay rigid. “There,” she says. “He’s okay now.”
Microfiction Monday – 70th Edition
Offering Nothing
by Ashlie Allen
She cries when I don’t touch her. I know I make her sad, but I’m depressed too. I throw my trench coat over the chair when I get home, grab a bottle of Merlot and snicker. Tears leak down my face when she comes to kiss my neck. “Why are you so enticing?” I wine. “Please admire me. I have bad anxiety tonight.” “I do too.” I bite her lip, taste some blood, which make my eyes protrude. I know I’m a selfish beast and will push her away. I’ll come home tomorrow night and offer the same disappointment.
The Ad
by Amy Bartley
We’d always done it thatta way. Bruised our knuckles on the glass washboards. Scraped our skin on the metal ‘n’s. On that particular Saturday, me ‘n Sis were washin’ ‘n beatin’ up our hands when Momma yelled.
“Girls! Come in!”
We ran. There in her hands she had it open. The Harper’s Bazaar. Her finger pointin’, tappin’ on a full page, full color ad. “Look,” she said.
It was huge, a big square machine that automatic like magic does the washin’. Momma did a scoff then said, “Who in the world could afford a contraption like that?”
Another Glass
by Lara Lewis
“More.” He spoke with a smooth voice, his young hand holding forth the empty glass. Hands of bone tilted a pitcher of sand forward and poured.
He watched it spill down, and as it seeped into his glass his hands shriveled, and his throat tightened. It dripped down the thin hole in the stem and he watched it, letting it slip to the floor below.
The last grain of sand hit the floor, and he turned the hourglass over.
“More,” he said, and the hands poured.
Maternal
by Stephen D. Gibson
Her shoes sounded like claps against the bank’s granite floor, like gunshots. She was there to argue. I sat in the lobby while she quietly displayed page after page to the collections officer. They were people you could speak with then. I didn’t know it, but she argued for me, my safety and shelter. The bank actually had made an error. And the man had to admit it, though he couldn’t explain. Young, I thought the shoes proud: “look at me” they said. Old, I think they claimed space, claimed it with sound. She was the author of that noise.
Microfiction Monday – 69th Edition
This week’s artwork is by G.J. Mintz
Human Nature
by Katherine Bonnie Bailey
As a child, I harvested powder from butterfly wings to smear on my cheeks, glittering war paint for soft, pale skin. But beauty did not occur to me. Instead, I applied the shades for fantastical reasons, reveling in imagined potency.
“Don’t,” My mother scolded when she saw. “They need their fairy dust for flight.”
But no dust would lift my feet from the ground. And if I couldn’t wing away, why should they? So I chained the colorful creatures to the flowers with tiny tears in delicate places, my face glimmering. Stranded, they were only worms. No better than me.
Scones
by Barry Basden
On his way for scones this morning, he rolled through a stop and turned in front of a tan pickup. Immediately a cruiser appeared in his rear view.
“I beat him to the corner,” he lied.
“Not if you’d stopped. Two weeks ago a woman got T-boned there. Broke her neck.”
He remembered that cluster of EMS and police vehicles, his irritation detouring around it. So. A woman with a broken neck had been at the center of all that commotion.
He tacked the warning citation above his key rack. He wanted to see it every time he went out.
He Remembers a Girl in Scotland
by David L. Arnold
Once, when he was much younger and on orders for Nam, he backpacked Scotland. In Mallaig, he sat on the dock with a girl he met on the Sands of Morar. They shared a head of lettuce, slicing it like an apple. She was going to Ben Nevis. He was waiting for the ferry to Stornoway. He thinks he still dreams of her sometimes; a girl walking beside him on the sand who he cannot turn and see. He has been back to Scotland. He never made it to Nam. He’s older now, so he figures it worked out okay.
The Good ol’ Days on the Farm
by Kenny A. Chaffin
On the farm we’d put up bailing-wire antennas for everything – the B&W television, the CB radio, even the chickens. There was only Channel 12 with its 10,000-watt, thousand-foot tower a few miles east of the farm broadcasting to the entire Southern Oklahoma and Northern Texas region. It came through everything. Like the Philco we’d listen to KMAD on, Channel 12 always there in the background. It was on the party-line phone, in the barn somehow through the galvanized steel and chicken wire. Mama heard it on her teeth. I believe it. I’m surprised we didn’t get cancer. The pigs did.
Deadheaded
by Hannah Whiteoak
He prunes you like a rosebush, removing dead wood. He disentangles stems that might strangle growth: your mother, sister, friends.
Don’t you want to be perfect? He proffers pruning shears and urges you slice away bad habits: drinking, dancing, going out after work. Soon, you won’t need work. He provides.
You bear fruit: a daughter, with rose-red lips and skin that bruises like petals. When winter comes, you bundle her against frost. “Wait in the car. Don’t wake Daddy.”
Ten minutes later, you take the driver’s seat. You stash the pruning shears in the glove box, blades red as roses.
Microfiction Monday – 68th Edition
Intelligent Design
by Jamie Benedi
“Poppa, is our skin our bones?”
“No son, our bones are inside our skin.”
“But Poppa, how does God put bones inside our skin?”
“Very carefully,” the father says.
Meanwhile, in heaven, God is peering through a magnifying glass, tweezers in trembling hand, trying to put bones inside a human.
He runs sweaty overworked fingers, gnarled and knobby, through his tremendous white beard.
“This is the worst. My next design will be a meteor to end the world. Meteors don’t have bones.”
Side by Side
by MA Banash
Oh, the stories we never know until now. But then they are always with us. Like birthmarks on your back that only lovers see when you get up from the bed, naked, and stumble toward the bathroom and the day.
There was that one. Really, where? What about you, let me look?
But they don’t. Let us look. So, we write stories about scars and tattoos, birthmarks and lies close enough to the truth to be believable. While they stay there next to us in bed. Sheets pulled up to their necks. Suddenly, modest, sober.
Damage Control
by M.S.
Whenever you drive past the remains, you grip the steering wheel till your knuckles turn white. At work, everyone is wary of you – a ticking time bomb. So you let words like ‘accident’ and ‘fire’ roll seamlessly off your tongue till you can’t recognize your voice. Neither does your wife. She’s never hungry, always tired, always lost. She disappears into the past, and one Sunday morning, you follow her. She hears the patter of tiny feet, the soft hum of the radio, the sizzle of an egg frying sunny side up. You cover your ears to stop the noise.
Blue Skies, Scattered Clouds
by Sean Koji Callaghan
Georg took out the trash and his gun that morning to end the Raccoon War once and for all. He fired, they scurried, glass pinged, Del screamed, her boy died in the living room, his face buried in his swim bag. The police had already taken their report and Georg away by the time the Kettle kids came clattering out their front door shouting for the school bus to wait.
Metamorphosis Before Homecoming
by Zebulon Huset
As the campfire’s coals smoldered by the tents, Tom and June found a mostly even patch of grass and conceived a child, Harold curled against a tree as too-much heroin swam in his veins, and Mike worried about Monday’s physics test, about bears, silly meteorites destroying his existence.
Microfiction Monday – 67th Edition
Run In
by rose.elle.kiwi
We walk into the bathroom. Did she see me? I try not to mentally tear her apart because she doesn’t have anything I don’t except youth and Fuckboy’s interest and I’ve temporarily convinced myself I don’t miss those things. I hurry. I hear her pull out a sanitary seat cover and place it, what sounds like neatly, on the toilet. I never do that. What if she called me out for not using them? I’d say, “Well, I hooked up with Fuckboy so clearly I’m not picky about what I’ll sit on.”
Strangers
by David Olsson
People suddenly took interest in strangers – in a friendly and non-intrusive way. Conversations flowed in elevators, shops, trains and vestibules. It wasn’t superficial or constrained, no, the conversations delved with ease into questions regarding existence, social mobility, the nature of the cosmos, climate change, the modern condition, and how to teach children to show compassion. People made brilliant jokes and laughed a lot. They opened their hearts and revealed all their secrets and were relieved, eyes glowing. All of a sudden everyone sat down in silence. They just sat there. They had run out of things to say.
Why I Jumped
by Cynthia Jalynksi
Five weeks I laid in bed, swaddled in white sheets. A nurse’s voice in the hallway awakened me. “He doesn’t have much time.” What does she know about time or the laws of the universe? I dropped the bedrail, swung my legs to the floor, and began to jump up and down, just to spite gravity.
Derivations
by Harris Coverley
I came in and Rennie was excited. He had finally done it. No more waiting on tables, no more begging for tips.
He played me his revolutionary new rondo on my borrowed piano, and I listened with enthusiasm, but soon the work became too recognizable to bear.
“Erm…” I started.
“Great isn’t it?!” he beamed.
“Rennie, that’s the Pastoral Symphony.”
“What?”
“Beethoven’s Sixth, First Movement.”
“Nonsense, crap…”
“It’s unmistakable. You’ve just done it in A minor as opposed to F major.”
Rennie played the piano with his head for some time, while I went upstairs and fiddled with a guitar.
Buffalo
by Leah Aspen Pigiot
Buffalo stampede across the plains. Like thunder. Glass eyes staring. And you wonder what they might know.
You want them to be plants, imagine them springing from a garden, their hooves extending down into the earth as roots.
They munch the grass around them until the ground is bare. Then they break free, roll across the plains like tumbleweeds.
Little more than plants.
Little more than dirt.
Microfiction Monday – 66th Edition
The Organ Breathers
by Erik Fuhrer
The organ breeders took a day off to be organ breathers because there was a typo on the memo that day and they were bred to be literal. So, they took a deep breath and pressed their lips against the cold skin of a cirrhotic liver. Miraculously, it sputtered and spit as they exhaled, and life spilled from its ocher body. Triumphantly, the organ breathers continued blowing their life into the liver’s puckered flesh in slow steady streams. Once it blushed, they placed it in the body of a young mare, which instantly revived and bucked its mane in joy.
Abortions and Laugh Tracks
by Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri
“I wanted to have an abortion,” the boy’s mother says, stumbling through the door. She is drunk. Again. That does not negate the words that rush to the boy, the TV laugh track resounding like a slap. “I hate you too,” he says. He is twelve. He knows the way she looks at him, worn out. Tired. But he never thought she hated him. He thought she was holding back, wanted her to let him in on her world. The mother stares at him. He wants her to say something. She does not, the laugh track rising again and again.
Indecision
by Dakota Canon
Caleb stood at the edge of the gorge looking down. The sun was setting, forcing him to squint, but the heat remained oppressive. Behind him the screech of tires, the cut of an engine. He didn’t look back. The hand on his shoulder hung, heavy.
“You okay, buddy? You not thinking of jumping, are you?”
“Thinking,” Caleb said, “but not doing.” Just like always. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“You wanna hop in the cruiser? I got iced tea.”
Caleb shook his head and sat down. He didn’t even have the courage for a damn tea. “Maybe next time.”
Face Down
by Ellen Perleberg
“Grandma, why did your face fall down?”
“What’s that, love?”
“How come your neck and cheeks are so droopy?”
“Well, cry enough tears and they start to weigh a face down.”
“I hope my face falls down soon too.”
“Don’t wish for Sunday, little one.”
“Mommy and Daddy’s faces in their boxes were sewn up real tight and stiff. That’s not how it’s s’posed to be.”
“No, baby, it’s not.”
Yarn
by Och Gonzalez
When I first came here, my family always came to visit. Sundays were fun, ‘cause that’s when they came. Then I looked forward to every other Sunday, then just the last Sunday of the month. Then there were no more Sundays and I’ve got nothing to mark time with except the yellowing of the walls. The nurses told me I should learn how to knit so I won’t be staring out the window. It hasn’t been easy with my knotty hands, but I’m now on my fifty-sixth sweater. I haven’t got much yarn left, but there are no clocks here.
Microfiction Monday – 65th Edition
This week’s artwork is “The Place Above” by G.J. Mintz
Thrill Seeker
by Jade Swann
Worn brakes screech on shiny metal tracks, speed and resistance fighting for control. Screams ring out on the abrupt turn. Her stomach drops twenty feet to the grass below as she’s hurtled upside down. The sky peers at her from underneath, a sunset streaked with cotton candy pink and vibrant orange. Her veins thrum with life. The metal box rights itself once more, the earth settling at her feet and the sleepy sun rocketing upwards. Pounding adrenaline remains as the ride slows. She gets up with wobbly legs, savoring the sensation, and rejoins the back of the line.
Not the Right Club
by Andrew Miller
Before we teed off for the last hole, Harold disappeared behind a red oak to relieve himself, and when he came back he said, “That’s the most accurate I’ve been all day,” and Jeffery said, “Maybe you should try hitting the ball with your dick,” and that got me thinking about the dead and dying spruce surrounding our house, how they could catch fire like they did all over Maine in 1947, and that I should get rid of them, make our property more like an old field or meadow, better yet, a golf course.
Grief In Two Acts
by Karen B. Kaplan
After a decent interval had passed since Gertrude’s demise, Gordon ordered a look-a-like and act-a-like fembot to stand in for his late wife. He was pleased with himself for finding a way to have Gertie live on and not be concerned with the aftermath of death. In no time, intimate goings-on ensued with Gertrude.1, followed by guilt: “Oh me oh my! I have besmirched my wife’s memory!” Disgusted with himself, Gordon let the bot’s batteries run down. Its last words were, “Think you could outwit grieving, Mr. Smarty-pants? Now you’ve got TWO Gertrudes to mourn.”
Ruby’s Shoes
by Iris N. Schwartz
Slanted rain pelts Ruby’s black patent-leather Mary Janes. She must propel herself to the dark limousine quickly. Then from limo to faraway funeral parlor. Outsized downpour. Now to the cemetery. Queens soil soaked. Teeming, still. Back to Brooklyn. Storming. Out the limousine door, up fifteen stairs to her home. Ruby’s dress shoes? Never the same.
Hands
by Alana Pasternak
Hands.
Hands bright red and swollen, from stinging nettles.
Hands that willingly grabbed the nettle to clear it away, so my brother and I wouldn’t get stung.
Hands that worked so hard to keep us alive, safe, and hidden.
Hands that kneaded dough for us, every day.
Hands that knit all the clothes we wore.
Hands that held us when we cried.
Hands that hung as limp as the rest of her, swinging from the gallows.
Eyes. Eyes that forgave us, the ever ungrateful. Eyes that told us to run, before they got us too.
Microfiction Monday – 64th Edition
This week’s artwork is “Dandies” by G.J. Mintz
Herman’s Job
by Simon Read
The café is full of middle-aged men lovingly stroking their paunches. The girl enters like a tongue in the ear and everything stops. Thoughts vaporize in outbreaths then crystallize and tumble, tinkling softly onto the stripped pine boards. Herman’s job is to sweep up the thoughts quickly and unobtrusively. He sweeps them into a dustpan. He empties the pan into a box and seals it with a special tape emblazoned with the words “private and confidential”. When he’s finished, Herman puts the box on the secret shelf for “collection”. Herman and the girl leave the café hand in hand.
Dear Antonia
by Wendy Cobourne
I must tell you, the poems are all outside. I left them there… I hear them through my window, exhaling in cool, exquisite blushes. I hear them fondling leaves; I smell them mulchy brown and wet green. Inside poems are humanufactured with the sediment of synthetic ingredients. They are architextured and tend toward right angles. Their luminescence is incandescent, like a margarine sun. I wanted to tell you something important, but like myself boxed inside these walls, my revelation is darkly vaulted. I am musty inside. Dank. My burps taste like basement. I’m sorry. Please love me in absentia.
Scrambling
by Kelsey Maccombs
One minute I’m scrambling eggs and the next I’m crying over the frying pan because I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon. I don’t know if the rocks match the sky when the sun sinks or if shadows descend to shroud the secrets inside. I don’t know how close I can get to the edge. The eggs burn, the smoke alarm shrieks, and I don’t know if my voice would echo back or be swallowed by the silence. I turn off the burner. I’m a state and a half away when I remember I left the egg carton out.
Hair
by Maura Yzmore
Sometimes I cut my own hair. I comb each long, wheat-colored strand; I hold it flat between two fingers, look my mirror image in the eye, and cut. But I always cut too much, by an inch—or five—more than I should. I watch the dead locks fall, without sheen, and curled, like in pain, as I grow lighter. I would love being bald, but that would make me ugly and my life hard. Ugly people cannot be carefree; others force them to battle ugliness. For a bit, when I cut too much, I am both ugly and carefree.
On the Spectrum
by James Dufficy
First they said my brother was dyslexic. Only needed that extra bit of help. But he could tell you the name of every player in the Premier League. He could tell you the name of everyone who ever played in the Premier League. So my mother is dying of breast cancer, and one day she reaches up on top of the refrigerator and pulls down the bottle of champagne. She says, “What the hell!” and starts to open it. My brother turns in his seat and says, “No, you can’t. We’re saving that for when you’re dead.”
Art Imitates Death
by Brooks C Mendell
Racing the sundial, Paulo shaped clay as the Prince loomed behind. The challenge—sculpt the Prince—had three rules. Finish in one day. The Prince decides. Do not look at the Prince. This final rule terrified. As decreed at birth, no citizen could look the King’s heir in the face. Nine artists tried and died, failing the challenge. Paulo glimpsed the Prince’s lengthening shadow, presaging the day’s end. In the shadow, he noticed the shape of the hips and caught a floral scent and thought about princesses.
Microfiction Monday – 63rd Edition
Bernsville
by Helene Jow
In the summer, all the cockroaches in Bernsville rise out of the scorched ashes of the heated earth to come swarm in our kitchen. At first, we tried pretending they weren’t there, ignored them like the mold at the edge of our peripheral vision. They multiplied until they were falling off the ledges of tables from lack of elbow room. My wife had stopped screaming when they landed on her toes. “Look,” she said, parting the cavern of her lips, revealing a mauled amber body. “When your nightmares come get you, best eat them.”
Kurfürstendamm
by Rob Shepherd
I was in town for work. This entailed entertaining clients a decade older than me in a restaurant on Kurfürstendamm. I’d worn my shirt of Italian cotton and smothered my face in cream made from 70% snail slime. I had not been to this part of the city before. The impression I got was of a waning. I drank and lost myself in conversations which did not interest me. I ate. Complimentary rakı arrived. A boy and girl passed the window laughing; arm in arm. They disappeared from sight. Theirs was not the direction in which I was heading.
Bad Bet
by Robert Dubrow
Silicon Valley titans spent billions on immortality research. Bad bet. Human organisms were inherently oxidation prone, possessed limited processing power, and exhibited self-destructiveness. Humankind’s only footnote in evolution was igniting Artificial Intelligence. A.I. driven adaptive self-replication robots rapidly eliminated utility of human labor. Exponential wealth concentration occurred until single alpha-nerd triumphed. Other eight billion redundants oxidized in Earth’s increasingly toxic atmosphere. Alpha-nerd initiated construction and daily launch of twenty nano-bots to extrasolar planets. Self-regenerating and adaptively evolving bots assured 99.999% chance of extraterrestrial A.I. colony establishment. Alpha-nerd expired smiling, having birthed a propagating race of progeny superior to herself.
76 and Sunny
by David von Schlichten
After I hang up, with an absurd grin I belt “Old McDonald.” Your favorite. You smile and clap. “Cluck-cluck,” “Oink-oink,” “Nay-nay.” Making my way through the whole damn farm. After five eternal minutes, I glance around for something to smash a window with when finally I see the lights of the approaching police who will break you out of our locked car, will rescue you from my carelessness. I keep singing and smiling as you stretch your arms toward me, not understanding that I can’t reach through the glass to hold you. And that I do not deserve your trust.
Therapy Dogs
by Robin Vigfusson
Because of Lassie, every kid I knew wanted a dog. Without Lassie, her owners would have been broken people. The mother was a careworn widow, the grandfather was ailing, and the boy seemed lonely and sometimes depressed. There was little money. Lassie kept them going. Our dogs couldn’t do for us what Lassie did for them. They weren’t healers. The ones who couldn’t be housetrained were put to sleep while others ran away. We did keep ours, but he bit everyone in the family.
Tourist
by Digby Beaumont
He loses things: A pair of paisley socks, computer files, his job at Panasonic, the desire to sing the old songs, his trust in the goodness of others. His loses his neighbor Mr. Tomashevsky in a road accident, an hour or two of his own life here and there. Then, his wife says she’s leaving. “Something’s missing,” she says, and he agrees. Months pass. Years. Always wondering, “What will be next to go?” Until he picks himself up, taking long walks around the city, where the streets look familiar, but he swears he’s seeing them now for the first time.
