slimy new life

            It was early in the night when I arrived to Doc Solomon’s but the moon was already high up above and periodically flickered, looking like a cosmic blinking eye; the pupil pointed directly at me. There was yellow in its sclera. Terrestrial jaundice. I stared on dejected, watching a fat roach-like monster the size of a cat skitter and hike its wiry whip legs swiftly up into the cavity above a car tire. When Barnes arrived I was on a come down, forehead heavy and packed with depression and feeling a little sick. A lone taxi lolled down the street toward me, deposited him under street light, and disappeared among the tall industrial brick buildings and metal scaffold skeletons. He coughed into his fist then nodded in my direction.             “Ward,” he said. “Anything new?”             “Well, the world is on fir...

Observe the insect. Half drunken and daydreaming from a barstool, a glitch of the brain picking maggots from the counter-top peanut bowl between drags from my cigarette. At times I caught glimpses of myself in the reflection of the bar’s mirrored back. I have the head of a grasshopper, pallid green flesh stretched thin across the backs of my hands. I tucked the smoke between mandibles; I stared into my one clouded silver eye. Across the room, a fly in the shape of a man vomited green acid onto his cheeseburger and then drank up the half-melted slop. Adrift in a mental flurry, I thought about the apocalypse. Distorted frames of bombed-out buildings and quick flashes of old nuke films I’d seen were warped behind the CRT bubble-screen of my mind. Radioactive war would certainly solve my problems. I was wholly consumed by a nuke fantasy by the time I heard the digital chime of the bar’s door and the heavy stomps of Barnes approaching me. He was angry again. A thick hand gripped the back o...