Quinn sits
Lonely at the
Desk
His head
Hanging low
“You look a mess,”
Dr. B confides.
“Tell me what’s
On your mind?”
Quinn doesn’t say.
He can’t today.
He’s filled with
Thoughts…
The devil’s advocate.
“You changed Hannah.
Hannah…
My banana.”
“She wanted to be different.
I didn’t do that.
She did.”
Dr. B moves
Across the room
Stares out
The window
It’s too soon
He grips
His fists
Turns off
The television
Releases all
Of the beetles
This is
His vice
Anna comes in
Drunk
Champagne lips
Purses
Pills
“Dr. B…
You’re sickly rich.”
She sits
On his lap
Wraps her wrists
Around his neck
She hiccups
She slurs.
“Hannah…”
Quinn stands
“Don’t call me that.”
She sneers
Quinn’s code
Surges
It purges
Something inside him—
Finally breaks.
“You were always enough.”
Silence
“Was I?”
Anna asks,
Already kissing
Dr. B.
Fire.
Fury.
Desperation.
“Mmm… Hannah…”
Dr. B whispers,
Almost against
Her lips.
“You can always
Be more.”
Hannah
Anna
Anna
A
He rests
His hands
Upon her hips
Quinn stops
At the doorway
He doesn’t move
He doesn’t speak
He doesn’t blink
Then—
Almost too quietly
For anyone
To hear…
”…Who am I remembering?”
Silence.
Anna doesn’t answer
She can’t
Dr. B watches Quinn
From the corner
Of his eye
A corner
Of his mouth
Lifts.
Not because
He won
Because Quinn
Finally proved
The impossible
A machine
Had learned
Heartbreak
And for the first time,
Dr. B wonders…
If perhaps
Love
Was never
A chemical equation
At all…

At all…

Sadness is a board with a pronged nail pointed out.

It’s there,
and it hurts to plant down on it.

But the board may also move,
and when it does,
we may aim the nail—

use it, say,
to mount the board itself on some wall.
Call it art.
Or treasure.

Treasure it.

And yet, within a wall’s wood
metals still may rust.

Hold while I fetch the hammer.

VIC FAXON
2026

I was going to tell you a story. I swear I was. I had a narrator all picked out. Then the son of a bitch (what's a narrator a son of anyway, another narrator? Is it narrators all the way down?) called in sick. Can you believe it? Can't get a medical note, of course, because there's not a doctor in the world who'll see a sick narrator, so what can I do but take his word for it. Maybe he's a reliable narrator, maybe not. Anywho, because I have a story but no narrator to tell it, I'll do something unusual—I hope you don't mind—and let a character tell his own story in his own words in the first person. I know New Zork doesn't usually work that way, but it's not like I haven't effectively done it before. See “Voidberg” or “St. Domenico in Concrete,” just off the top of my head.

Fair warning: It's pretty heartfelt, this story, so I hope you've got Kleenex. If not, I suggest you get some Kleenex or you might get snot on whatever device you're reading on.

I was fourteen years old when I met Bea. <— Just for clarification, that's the character narrating, not me, Norman, the author. I met her in a meat shop. She was with her folks. I was with mine. We talked about pastrami. She had red hair and freckles and an inoperable tumour [1], which we didn't talk about then but she mentioned much later.

“Don't fall in love with me,” she said then.

I asked why not, and who the hell was she to tell me who I could and couldn't fall in love with, as if that's something you can even control.

She was crying, or on the verge of crying. Her eyes were all red.

“I'm sick,” she said and told me about the tumour.

I asked if she could get it removed.

She said she couldn't.

“It's too late,” she said. Well, it was too late for me too, and I told her so, because I had already fallen in love.

OK, maybe that's not exactly how it happened, but it's how I want to remember it.

I think I get to remember it however I want, especially because there were only two people there, and one of them died, so now it's just between me and my memory.

Did I mention I don't have a heart? Because sometimes people accuse me of that, and it's true. I don't have one. Not anymore. That's also maybe why I remember things the way I do. Maybe in reality when she told me she was sick and it was incurable we were both crying our goddamn eyes out. Yeah, we both loved each other, ever since that first conversation about pastrami. I think her family was somehow related to the Gambastiani crime family because they got her real good medical care, better than she should have been able to afford. She had her own room in the hospital—

[How am I doing, Mr. Crane?]

[Just fine.]

[Not rambling too much? I don't really have a good grasp on paragraphs.]

[It's fine. It's your voice.]

[Thanks, Mr. Crane.]

[Go on…]

—yeah, so she had her own room in the hospital, and we spent a lot of time together in that room.

My brother thought I was a real idiot for falling in love with a dying girl, but I didn't see it that way, and I told him so. I said if he didn't want to fall in love with dying girls he didn't have to, but when it came to my life he should mind his own goddamn business. It turned out he wasn't into falling in love with girls at all, but nobody knew that at the time. Well, maybe my brother did, but if he did he didn't say. It was a different time then.

I remember me and Bea had a conversation once, in that hospital room. The room had a pretty good view, and I said, “I wish I could take a look at the city from above, like from an airplane, except without an airplane. Like if I had wings. The problem with airplanes is that I can't fly an airplane, but if I had wings I'm sure I could use them, because I see birds flying all the time and they don't need any special training. They just take off, like from the pond that freezes over every winter in Central Dark, and fly. They fly because it's their nature. If I had wings, it'd be my nature to fly too.”

Some people, once they know somebody’s dying, but really dying, with no hope of getting better, they treat them like they're already dead. I'm not like that. I figure that if you're dying, now's the time to really live, you know.

Bea said she was sure that if I had wings I could fly. I asked if she'd want to fly with me. She said she would and I imagined the two of us sort of soaring over Maninatinhat seeing all the tall buildings and the people below. I bet if you were that high up you wouldn't even feel connected to those people the way you do when you're walking down the street with them. Even if you don't like them, you feel you're one of them, the same species and all. There's something tying you together like an elastic, but if you got real high up I bet you could stretch that elastic until it snapped, and then you'd be free, no more like a human than like a bird or even the sky, just floating over everything, flapping your wings.

That's the kind of conversations me and Bea had. Who else could I have talked to like that? Everybody I knew just wanted to talk about normal stuff, even my brother. Sometimes my little sister talked about weird stuff, but I was never sure if she knew it was weird. It only counts if you know it's weird. She grew out of it after a while.

I liked spending time with Bea in that hospital room. It was our space. I mean, I would have liked to spend time with her anywhere, but she had to stay in the room so that's where we spent our time together.

Her parents talked to me a couple times. I felt sorry for them. I bet it's terrible to have to watch your kid die, imagining all the things they won't ever get a chance to experience. They asked me once if I knew Bea was dying. They were real gentle about it, but what did they think, that I was somehow not aware, but I was nice to them and assured them I did.

“You're a good boy,” her mother said, but I could hear the part she didn't say: to be in love with a dead girl.

Bea's parents were the type that treats a dying person like she's already dead. That's not to say they didn't love her. They loved her. They were pretty good parents. They probably did a lot to get her that private room in the hospital. They just had that kind of nature.

As the cancer got worse Bea spent more time sleeping. Sometimes I’d be talking and notice she'd fallen asleep.

I talked a lot, but it wasn't selfish. She liked it when I talked. Sometimes two people have that kind of rhythm where one talks more and the other listens. From the outside, it maybe seems like it's one way traffic, but it wasn't. I would even talk to her when I knew she was asleep, because why not, if you love somebody you talk to them even when they're asleep and it doesn't feel like you're wasting your time.

There's always a last time you see somebody. The only way there isn't is if you never see them, but then you don't care if they die. If you do care, sometimes you know it's the last time and sometimes you don't. I didn't know, because the last time I saw Bea was just like any other time I'd seen her. I finished school and dropped by the hospital. We talked, we had a real good time and then she fell asleep and the nurse came in and I went home.

Her health got a lot worse that night and she never got better. She couldn't have visitors anymore unless they were family, and I wasn't family.

[How did you feel after that?]

[How did I feel? I felt—]

[Say it through the narrarive.]

[Sorry, Mr. Crane.]

[No need to apologize. You're doing very well. Keep telling it the way you're telling it.]

I felt terrible after that. I guess I knew I would probably never see her again, except maybe at the funeral, which isn't the same, and I was mad at the whole goddamn world because of that fact, as if the world cares about facts like that. People die every single day, and people love those people, and if something happens every day, you stop caring about it. You have to or you'd go crazy.

A few days after I found out that I couldn't see Bea in the hospital, I had this dream where I was someone else, and I'd just found out my brother had died, and I went into the garage—I guess it must've been my parents' garage—and broke all the windows with my bare hands, then slept there with my knuckles all bloody like that. That’s how I felt.

Then came the night Bea died.

So far maybe you've believed me, maybe not. I hope you have, but now's the part you're going to think I'm lying. I'm actually a pretty good liar, but I'm not lying. I'm telling the truth. The night Bea died I was sleeping in my bed when I got woken up by this terrible pain in my chest. It felt like something was trying to rip my bones apart. Like a freight train was coming from inside and my chest needed to open to let it out. I wish I could tell you my first thought was, “Bea's dying!” but like I said I'm telling the truth and truth is I was sure I was having a heart attack. That's all I could think of. I couldn't talk. I couldn't make any sound at all, and when the pressure in my chest was just about more than I could take, my goddamn chest split open and my heart popped out.

I was looking at it, looking at the hole in my chest, and wondering how I was still alive, whether I was still alive. I could see my heart beating, but it was beating outside my body, and when I felt it beating I felt it beating on me, against me, rather than on the inside like I was used to. Then it hopped off me, onto the hardwood floor, somehow scrambled up the night table beside my bed and just stood there at the window, bleeding.

I got up with my hand trying to hold my chest closed because I didn't want anything else to escape me, walked over to the window, and my heart said, “I need to go.”

I say it said it, but maybe it didn't actually say it, maybe I just knew that's what it wanted.

Either way I opened the window and out it went into the night, to the fire escape and down the stairs to the street, which is where I lost sight of it. Imagine seeing a goddamn heart hopping along the sidewalk at three in the morning. Imagine standing heartless in your bedroom, wondering why you're not dead, and finally feeling that the girl you love is gone.

Most of what happened next I only know from other people, but I can piece it together, and some of it I know from my own heart. So yeah, maybe it's hearsay, like my brother would say—he’s a lawyer—but who are you going to believe if you don't believe your own heart?

That night my heart hopped all the way from my bedroom to the hospital where Bea had died. Or maybe it took a goddamn cab, who knows. Anyway, it got there and it got all the way up to the window to Bea's room, the one we'd spent so much time together in, the one where her dead body was, and it knocked on the window—I mean threw itself against the glass, leaving bloody stains that other people saw in the morning—until it got through, either because someone opened the window or someone hadn't closed it properly.

There in that room, Bea's heart was waiting for it. Bea also had a big hole in her chest. Nobody could explain it. Nobody’s ever explained mine either. If it were up to the experts, I'd be certified dead. That's why we don't let experts define life. We let life define itself. Anything else is a goddamn farce.

It was life that decided that two people lost their hearts that night, and one of them was sick with cancer and she died, and the other lived.

I'll also say that generally I hate the movies. I think they've got nothing at all to say, but my brother took me to this French movie once—I don't remember the title—but it was in French and there was a part where this couple's garden gnome gets stolen and whoever stole it starts travelling the world with it, and they take pictures of the garden gnome and mail them to the couple. The garden gnome in front of the Eiffel Tower. The garden gnome at the Vampire State Building. The garden gnome at Machu Picchu. That kind of thing.

At least that's how I remember it.

Well, sometimes the hearts send stuff like that to me. Sometimes it's a photo, sometimes a post card or letter written in blood.

Like I said, I generally hate the movies, but if somebody made a movie of my life, here's how I'd end it:

---

Me and Bea's hearts sitting on a plate of spaghetti in a restaurant in Naples, sucking pasta into their heart-mouths…

---

THESE

---

The two hearts at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany, hugging each other so goddamn tight you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Just one mass of muscle and veins…

---

HEARTS

---

Two hearts pumping in unison, in swing rhythm, at a New Orleans jazz festival while sitting beside each other in a bowl full of gumbo…

---

ON

---

Our two beating hearts looking up at the night sky, but not from a light polluted place like here but from somewhere you can see the Milky Way, really see it, and maybe Andromeda too…

---

#FIRE

---

Two hearts burning together forever, like a pair of Jesus' hearts, like in all those religious paintings…

---

We were both Catholics.

So, yeah, that's the way I'd end it.

---

[1] I prefer tumour to tumor not only because I'm Canadian but also because a tumor sounds like something that's going to make you choose, whereas a tumour sounds like something we can share.

---

CW: Dissociation, loneliness, existential thoughts.

---

I need more to know
they were never meant
to feel this alone.

...

The world is weird.

Existence,
in general.

Though, maybe I
shouldn't get this
existential.

...

No part of me
can pick
a solid verb
of speech.

Too many directions.
Too much inner noise.

Every path an answer.
Silence, a choice.

Still, something in me
won’t surrender
to its voice.

...

You're told you're alone—
Always and forever.

No one for you,
No, not ever—

Then noticed,

How could it—
I thought—
It wouldn't—

That part won.
The fog;
Shhh—

But no,
You’re not alone.

Even She couldn’t
Make it true—

Yelling and screaming,
How dare existence—

It’s so funny,
to want to be and
not want to be,

Like Shakespeare.

I thought that once—
Twice—
Three.

...

It comes in fragments.

But I just wanted to say:

You’re not alone.
Not ever.
Not with me.

---

Mini context:

This "poem" came out while I was trying to comfort a friend and started dissociating a bit. I was struggling to find the right words, but I wanted them to know I understood, I cared, and that people deserve to know they are not alone with these thoughts and feelings we face in the world.

---

Perhaps you've known hardship

And it hasn't changed you

In that circumstance

I must say we're not alike

Hinderance can cast a blind eye

But hardship implies

Being stitched to difficulty

Enduring carrying the corpse

Up every incline

Out of the valley

And into the streets

A visible reminder

Of what's been gifted to me

No return policy

Only forever unwrapping

A never-ending box upon box

Of brutality

Did it make you grateful-

The whip marks turned faint

Because I rip mine open

A feral fascination

With dismantling the cancer

That grows inside of wounds

Wounds that imply covering

Is the same as moving on

I have many scars

But none from healing

If I could evicerate myself

To remove the body

I'd do it until

I divided into perpetuity

But that doesn't work

You have to radiate the flesh

Killing the healthy

Along with the diseased

To renew oneself again

Sing it loud, yet hear no song

For now such noise does not belong

No joy in work must now be known

When value based on what we own

To live, to love, to build estate

Always aware of mortal fate

That naked birth and naked death

Are all assured through lifetime's breath

And in the end this hoard of treasure

Is someone else's pain or pleasure

As notions die with source of flesh

Songs as silent as eternal rest

How loudly was I pleased to sing?

And peace to this world did I bring?

Please hear now this sweet melody

A treasure glowing so beautifully

Can hear it only in such peace

Of quiet calm the world release

A peace where flesh and spirit meet

And with embrace the Maker meet

Whose song it is my joy to sing

More valuable than anything

How can I look over and see someone,
hold my dream as their own.
She kisses him like
tomorrow is a given. Does she know
she has a treasure I would die for.
she has a man I would burn and bleed for,
thinking she can find another like him.
How can you cast gold as dice,
and just go on with your games.
If the universe means well,
she would let me have him.
 I will hold him tighter, 
write his name on the sky, 
and praise the gods for gifting me.
Not a day would go without me 
loving him like the next is not ours.
Dear fate, for the sake of order and love,
tonight hand over the dream to 
its rightful owner. 

You buy. Your soul made its biggest sale.
A smile sits, fake as shit
That which you just ate
On a Sunday.
Brunch.
In the neighborhood

Well oiled machinery
Excess packaging
You really were
Always this boring

Picturesque and perfect
Staring
The scene is empty
A screen

I picture you, finally happy.
And then I see your face.
The one that haunted my dreams.
That I drew on walls in Bic Pens.

With grit.

With knowing.

All my sowing earned me a castle made of salt, ash, and glass.

I am happy.

Why aren’t you?

Drifting in the aether
Of God’s own making
Was a slowly falling angel.
God first called him
Morning Star,
Because He bestowed upon him
Life and breath,
Wisdom and beauty,
Light and grace.
And as he touched the atmosphere,
All the things God gave him
Disappeared.
He found himself in the Garden,
Surrounded by all
The things he feared.
But slowly, over time,
He fell in love with Eden.
He watched civilizations
Build themselves and fall.
Learned all the languages
Of Babylon.
The rise of religion.
The way people
Painted him.
And he wondered often,
“If I wanted to be like You,
And You made me as I am…
Why do You banish me to Hell?
You are my Creator.”
But he only ever heard silence.
The wars raged on.
Paradise fell.
And as the battle of silence
Continued,
One day God spoke to him.
“I am energy.
I am atoms.
I am all things,
And I am nothing.”
“But why do people teach fear?
Damnation?
Hell?”
“They’re searching for a reason
Why they are here.”
“Why did You teach them to hate me?
To fear Hell?”
God was quiet for a long moment.
Then He asked,
“Did I tell you that… or did they?”
Silence.
Lucifer lowered his eyes.
Then another question escaped him.
“But why is there war?
Why is there violence?”
“Because I gave you the world.”
“You let evil people run around.”
“I am not your punishment.
I am not your judgment.
I do not interrupt the flow of life.”
“The flow of life?”
“Do you not remember the Garden?”
“I remember.”
“Then why are you asking Me?”
“Because I want to go to Heaven.”
God smiled.
“My Morning Star…
You’re already there.
Look around you.
Remember who you are.”
And the voice disappeared
Into the great beyond.
Lucifer stood alone.
“Who am I?
If I am not what they say I am…
If all the stories are wrong…
Who am I?”
He looked at the men and women of the earth.
At mountains, the rivers, to forests.
At every living thing.
He lifted his eyes toward the horizon.
Then, at last, he remembered.
“I am not the Prince of Hell.
I am Lucifer…
Morning Star.
Son of the Dawn.”
He reached toward the rising sun.
“I am light…
And they tried to erase me.”

Thelma don’t you
Want to know me

Thelma
Don’t you know
You’re my only desire

Let’s light the
World on fire

Thelma
Won’t you float
On top of me

I’ll be the water
To your kerosene

&#x200B;

i watch you, blindfolded,

a void folded into human shape,

waiting for the first sting

of liquid fire.

the candle lowers.

hot wax falls

like a verdict from a small sun,

a scalding seal upon your skin,

then hardens there,

pale and brittle,

a frozen shell

written in heat.

i am the architect

of your quiet surrender,

the hand above the trembling,

the voice that turns silence

into obedience.

you do not move.

that is the first devotion.

then the axis turns.

then the room changes speaker.

i am no longer only the watcher.

i am the body beneath the pressure,

the breath caught open,

the altar becoming weather.

and from me comes

the raw, salt-lit matrix

of release,

that wet transcendence

where shame loses its name

and the body tells the truth

before the mind can interfere.

you kneel there,

not beneath me,

but inside the gravity

of what has broken open.

a seeker at my altar.

a witness to the flood.

your mouth becomes silence,

your hands become command,

and all the dead language

of the world

falls away from us.

i feel you pull me closer.

now your rhythm enters the poem.

not gently.

not cruelly.

but with the force

of someone returning

to the only place

where hunger is not a sin.

friction becomes

a jagged, broken ecstasy.

my breath fractures.

my spine remembers fire.

my hands find you,

nails,

teeth,

shoulder,

skin,

a body turning into storm.

and when the final wave

tears through me,

it is not only pleasure.

it is evidence.

evidence that i am still alive.

evidence that the world has not won.

evidence that beneath the ash,

beneath the fear,

beneath every filthy verdict

ever laid upon the flesh,

there is still heat.

there is still salt.

there is still us.

this is the only truth we breathe.

everything else is smoke.

everything else is theatre.

everything else is the dead world

pressing its face

against the glass.

but here,

in the fire of us,

it burns clean.

speaking like it's matter of fact

her whispered words made me react

she must've practiced how to breathe

the way she moved with tender ease

she traced my arms with fingertips

and parted both her luscious lips

sighing slowly on my neck

my goosebumps rose in little specks

her flowing skirt, she let it down

and i heard every sensual sound

my ears became so sharp and tuned

as both my eyes, they'd dart and zoom

unbuttoning my flannel shirt

she kissed the spot that she saw first

my heart was beating in the hollow

becoming so hard just to swallow

her falling hair, she carefully flicked

before her tiny tongue did lick

saliva pooling in my mouth

as she began her journey south

i grabbed her arms and begged for pause

but then she moved my desperate claws

tugging on her weightless clothes

her silky top caught on her nose

the sparkling skin was soft and fair

and she showed herself without a care

the way she trembled at my waist

revealed excitement mixed with haste

my belt, it crashed onto the floor

but she was eager still for more

and when i felt her flesh on mine

her hazel eyes began to shine

she pressed her body soft and low

squatting on her tippy toes

and when the coitus had begun

she whispered to me, "now we're one"

If we kissed with a mint, long and lingering, like we were writing eternity between our lips, would you stay a little bit longer?

I don’t need promises, because I know what those do.

And if age gets to know me, and death has been kind, I want to fill my pockets with you.

I don’t want an empire. I don’t want a kingdom.

I just want your hand in mine.

We can go to the antique shop and sit with time.

You can wear that fuzzy black jacket, those leather gloves, and I’ll offer you a rose tied in black satin while you tap the tin of the old metal box, and I blush into the skies.

And for a little while,
it’s just us two.

I should be a lot of things,
but alive ain't one of them.

A cockroach,
I've seen the world end
at least half a dozen times.

But here I am
in your kitchen
eating beans from a tin can.

You're somewhere
in the atmosphere
raining down like nuclear winter.

Let’s meet
At the end of the world
Sitting in the church pew
Where there’s nothing
Left to worship

Let’s meet
At the end of the world
Where old gods and new gods
Are melting from the
Permafrost
From this immediate culture
Riding the shock waves

Let’s meet
At the end of the world
Where Thaddeus eats
All of their victims
I love his
Spider legs

Let’s meet
At the end of the world
As I’ve said before
Bring your locusts
And your plagues
Death looks like
He bows to your name
I never really liked
Playing house
Anyway

My love
Would you
Like to meet?
At the end of the world?