Parody Of My Relationship With My Irish Boyfriend.
Parody of my relationship with my Irish boyfriend.
More Posts from Suduu
Photojournalism at its best, by Brennan Anderson with Nate Bartlett.
The burrito was good, but I believe this kid can actually get on the roof of anything.
I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worse suspicions: that everything's for sale, and piecemeal.
"Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing" by Margaret Atwood
Excerpt
This is the beginning of a yet-untitled novel about the lives and loves of a few hell-bound people in Brooklyn, including an excommunicated man trying to prove himself worthy of adopting his own son and a dominatrix sex worker prone to fits of homicidal rage.
***
One
It was 4:59 a.m., New York City in September, as Roman Hayes lied awake in bed, staring up at the mottled ceiling of his Brooklyn flat. And as he lied there with his blankets kicked off to the floor and his t-shirt plastered over his chest, where a great stain of perspiration had spread like blood over a gunshot wound, Roman breathed tentatively.
He looked over at the alarm clock on his nightstand. It read 4:59 in seedy little digital figures. Ante Meridiem. He switched off the alarm before it was due to detonate at five and sat up at the edge of his bed. Pulling his bloody shirt off over his head, he sat there with it in his hands, his hands tremulous with sweat, his head numb with a sense of misplacement. As his eyes gradually adjusted to the dark, Roman ran a hand through his hair, over his neck and shoulders and arms, and was relieved to find himself the same twenty-eight-year-old man he had been before he fell asleep.
He sighed. He had had such an explicit vision just prior to waking of being cut out of the womb. In his dream, he had been a fetus sleeping in amniotic comfort when suddenly he was brought out of darkness and exposed to fresh air, the cold and all the forces of the world bearing down upon him at once — gravity and normal and the like — pulling on him in every which direction, contorting and compressing his features to resemble that of a human being. Though in his dream state Roman had felt inexplicably invested in that painful process, he was relieved to find he was not, in fact, a fetus.
The premature grey light of daybreak seeped through the cracks in the blinds, reaching toward the hardwood and plaster surfaces of Roman’s room with reticence. Sensing his master was awake, an ancient Doberman rolled over in his cot on the floor and glanced up, his drooping eyelids giving him an air of perpetual world-weariness.
“Morning, Captain,” Roman muttered as he stepped over to the window and peered out.
At 5 a.m., the sky was pink and layered with wispy cumuli. The streets of Bensonhurst were empty but for a few stragglers — a bald man in a bathrobe checking the air in his tires, a dog circling a lamppost, some kid sneaking back into the upper story window of a condo down the street. A flock of pigeons abandoned a nearby rooftop to perch in a stand of rustling aspen lining the sidewalk. Meanwhile, the first commuter of the day pulled into nearby 71st Street Station, glowing with a telltale halo of radiance as it halted before the rising sun.
Captain came up behind Roman and gave him an affectionate nip on the hand. Old as he was, the dog possessed a resilient devotion to routine, and pawed impatiently at the doorknob while Roman grabbed a change of clothes and donned his running shoes.
