101 Words

“I can’t get the color right.” Jacob hurled the paintbrush, red streaking down the walls.

“You show in three weeks.” Lisa reminded him.

“The show’s not important. This is my art. It’s got to be perfect or else.” Jacob retorted.

“People pay five figures for your work. You paint dismembered bodies. You’re the modern Hieronymus Bosch. Of course the show’s important.”

This was the last event with him, Lisa promised herself.

Carly sidled next to Jacob. “Your highest sales yet. And that color red. So vibrant.” She glanced about the gallery. “Where’s Lisa?”

“It’s been an exhausting month. She was drained.”

After cremating you, I set your urn on the mantel over the fireplace.

Silent, collecting dust, you watch over me, advise me.

You want me to paint my nails like yours—chrome.

Want me to do my lips scarlet, wear my hair up, put on the torn baby-blue nightie.

When I refuse, you wriggle out of the urn in lacy shreds, ensnare and constrict me.

You make me cut myself—railroad tracks down my inner thighs—and parade for the town, your little marionette, dramatizing imagined crimes in the middle of the night.

Not my crimes.

No. I treated you right.

Everyone was a mind reader except for Jill.

When something tasted funny, her mum would say, “No it doesn’t.”

If a book seemed boring, her teacher would insist, “It definitely isn’t.”

After telling a boy she wasn’t interested, he’d usually reply, “You are really.”

Jill wasn’t certain telepathy existed, but then again, she wasn’t certain of many things. Maybe everyone really could read her mind on some deep, unconscious level.

So she ate her peas, and she read her Dickens, and she married Robert Govett.

“You must be so happy,” gushed everyone she knew.

Perhaps they weren’t mind readers after all.

He stomps his foot on the pedal. Everything goes fast. His young cheeks shake. From the dark, a tree emerges. Gearing up to fifth he continues towards it. He gets closer and closer.

In a hospital hallway, nurses do rounds. He’s lain in bed asleep since the crash. One shines a flashlight to his pupils. Weeks, and still no reaction.

Where he is, he’s behind the steering wheels, engine howling, hood imploding against that tree. Again, again, again, without a single delay.

He has tried to brake to end the loop, tried to steer away, but he never has enough time.

A beautiful demon sat at a cafe, sipping her soy-latte. A handsome stranger with a dishonest face sat beside her. He fell in love with her and confided every sin he committed: abusing women, abandoning his children, stealing client’s life savings. He sometimes caught glimmers of her true ugly demon form, but he didn’t care. No one loved him as she did. When the Demon knew she won his undying devotion, she spat at him, screaming he deserved death not love. She laughed when he swallowed the bottle of pills in his despair, then collected her reward from the Evil One.

A couple of months after we met, Buzz bought me a nice pair of pyjamas for my birthday. At first, the zipper buzzed its way up and down like a smitten bee. A month later it groaned like a rusty escalator with fluttering bristles on its sides. As my hair grew longer and got caught and clogged, and hurt to untangle, it made me squeak like a mouse or hiss like a cat.

Buzz never looked away from his sports shows. “You should have your hair cut.”

I gave it some thought and then I bought myself new one-piece pyjamas.