Nothing Matters: A Noir Love Story
Page 17
I stand in the centre of the room, say:
“Subject verb. Subject verb object. Subject verb indirect object direct object.”
X shakes his head.
I say,
“Auxiliary subject verb. Auxiliary subject verb object. Auxiliary subject verb indirect object direct object. Object auxiliary subject verb.”
X screams, says,
“Where are the names? What are the names? Why are the names? When are the names? Who are the names? How are the names?”
I nod, say nothing. But my mouth moves.
Say again nothing but my mouth moves again.
Into the frame of the window comes a large head. The head is larger than the window. Rows of teeth. More so. Black, shiny head. Hard. The eyes large and enquiring, covered in a see-through membrane, smoky, pixelated. I turn to X, push him down onto the wire bed frame. Open my coat. I am wearing a bikini. I am wearing my Queen of all Insects sunglasses. I straddle X. The breath of the thing outside clouds the window. X screams. The window clouds. X screams. Heavy breathing fills the room. I say,
“Subject verb object.”
X says, “No. Yes. No. Yes.”
I say, “Subject verb.”
X screams.
I wipe his forehead. Unstraddle him. Walk to the wardrobe. Step in. X has no face. X has a face. X has my eyes. X has his. X has my mouth. X gets up from the bed frame. Opens the wardrobe. It is empty. Out of shot, a phone rings. He walks to the front of the room. Only the top of his head and his left shoulder are visible. His voice muffled, he says,
“Yes, this is X. I’m sure. No. Yes.”
I say nothing. Look out of the window see X…
The Zero Article
…run & run & run. Stop. Turn back. Try to get by without them. Always. Without definites, indefinites, without markers. Call me who I am & I’ll tell you I’m not. That room did not exist. Does not. Nor does the wire bed frame, the giant eye, the escaping bird. All boils down to a misunderstanding. The incorrectness of words. Their fallibility. All words escape the mouth, the body, hurtling into space, to end up where? How? Why? Maybe there was no road, no roadhouse, no motels, no Babylon. Just words. The theme park is real. The Thunderbird is real. The tail—no pun intended—is real. What said were just words. Should have acted. Just done it. Got it over with. Placed arm around her, took her lips. But didn’t. Waited. Said. Told. Death of me. Death of I. Death of us. Fuck. There it is. It came to be known as “The Misunderstanding.” To Z, it was the mistake. No quotation marks, no capitals. But it was the starting pistol on a race to prove… To prove what? Love? Lust? The fear of rejection? It all started… It all starts… Don’t remember. Always escaping to find way back to imprisonment. Should have left it alone. Left the words forming in throat. Forming in mind. Mute. Silent. But words are Z’s blood. Think she wants out also. Both escape. Escape the possibility of communication. Z’s phantom tail. The constant chittering. The splash of dark red urine. The nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, so many eggs wrapped in foul saliva. Theory—blackness forms out of asking someone to do something they would never normally do. To be someone they would never normally be. That hatching has come back to haunt her. To haunt us. Fuck. There it is again. Always there, like a monstrous comma waiting for the final clause in the sentence. Life. Death. Or…
Points North
…resurrection. The highway reflected in the incoming headlights, bounced up, mirror-driven to the billboards that announce the film of the book of the actual events. Above everything. As if its spine presses against the very edge of the atmosphere, the skin on its muscular back tattooed with the sparse particles of the exosphere, the flashing scales of letters. Down. Moving down. At speed. Thermosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere, troposphere. Something trailing just out of sight, a cable, a limb, a tentacle? Dropping now into an icy landscape, the world shrunk to a snow globe. Wings heaving to position it steady, hovering above the fake railway tracks spread out like a skeletal fan in the snow’s white cover. And from above, it sees her running, dressed too lightly for this weather. Always willing wishing to be with her, always— striding and stumbling through the railway yard, the man catches her, grabs her hand. And down it comes, its claws rending the air as it lifts its toothed beak and roars silently among the snowflakes, its rancid breath melting the ice on impact, a pellet of feces falling from its anus, splattering the snow. No trains move. A platform with a waiting room appears. No birds fly. X pulls Z towards the abandoned station. No sound. Not even the earache crunch of footsteps. It follows them with its eyes, beating its wings steadily, cocking its head to one side, splashing the ground beneath with dark red urine. The clock is stopped. This is memory. Eternal. Recurring. Exile. Reconciliation. Ex nihilo. Conclusion a towards moves everything, here from.
Go…
Get set…
Get ready…
Because…
From here…
About the author:
Steve Finbow lives in Hokkaido, Japan. Future Fiction published his neo-noir novel Balzac of the Badlands in 2009. In the same year, Beat the Dust Press published “Asylum Beach: Travels in the Heteroptia”, long stories by three authors in Protest! Grievous Jones Press release Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom—a collection of short stories—in 2010. In 2011, Reaktion Books will publish his critical biography of Allen Ginsberg. Later in the same year, Creation Books plan to publish Grave Desire—a biography of Sergeant Bertrand incorporated in a cultural history of necrophilia. His short stories, non-fiction, and academic articles have appeared in international magazines, anthologies, and journals both print and online. He has been a writer for the avant-garde theatre company Quarantine, given lectures at Liverpool, Newcastle, Northumbria, and Durham universities in the UK, and Johannesburg, Venda, KwaZulu Natal, and North-West universities in South Africa. From 1989-1990, he worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg as editor and archivist. He has also worked at the Poetry Project, New York, for the biographer Victor Bockris, and for the artist Richard Long. At present, he is Extraordinary Senior Lecturer at NWU and a book reviewer for The Japan Times. His website is Indifferent Multiplicities.
About Snubnose Press
Snubnose Press is the ebook imprint of Spinetingler Magazine.
The snubnose revolver dominated visual crime stories in the 20th century. Every cop, every detective, every criminal in every TV show and movie seemed to carry a snubnose. The snubnose is a classic still used today.
The snubnose is easy to conceal and carry.
The snubnose is powerful.
The snubnose is compact.
That’s how we like our fiction.
Snubnose Press Titles:
Speedloader
Harvest of Ruins by Sandra Ruttan
The Chaos We Know by Keith Rawson
Monkey Justice by Patti Abbott
Dig Two Graves by Eric Beetner
Gumbo Ya-Ya by Les Edgerton
Old Ghosts by Nik Korpon
Old School by Dan O’Shea
Hill Country by R Thomas Brown
Forthcoming
Cold Rifts by Sandra Seamans
The Duplicate by Helen Fitzgerald
Karma Backlash by Chad Rohrbacher
To Die Upon a Kiss by Craig Wallwork
Bar Scars by Nik Korpon
The Jones Men by Verne Smith
City of Heretics by Heath Lowrance
Wild Child by Josh Stallings
The First Cut by John Kenyon
Moondog Over the Mekong by Court Merrigan
The Subtle Arts of Brutality by Ryan Sayles
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