The Weekend
Short Story
The weekend is a ticking crime bomb.
In search of the heart of the city, armed with a freshly-shaven sinister confidence, the bottom of the situation at hand is up for grabs. The beating of the doldrums’ energy is a call that few have the ears for, and boils down to a series of carefully placed questions to expose the truth. Of all the paths to choose, it waits for you in the corner, bifurcated from your naïveté that you so innocently started the day with. Things to follow: unzipped maroon jacket, self-service bars, an extra puff of cologne, graffiti bathroom stall, the peeled nerves sensing neck-on-neck. It’s time to be less thankful and more streamlined. The limitations of your temptations fade, and having a blast can expose your depths in the wake of its reach, the radius extending as far as you let it.
Catharsis is a benevolent dog, polarizing your lack of opinion, lack of choice, lack of shiny overcoat if you so desire. It is unrelenting in the denial complex. When faced with maneuvering from point C to point D, you get a constant barrage of reality’s right hook over and again. Your character says hello to the thespian and sits cross-legged for a cup of stare-down coffee.
The words are sips of sound in time-space complementing the soul overture to the lost. You old, indebted flight path softly lands on the unconscious tarmac of the river current, ebbing west in search of vast days and subtropical night. Moving past the cancer latitudes in your bloodstream, you find that between the archipelagos there is only sound and wetness. Reach up to eyes and feel restless, blink to end the drought and feed the endless.
Naming all that is visible in numbers and relegating lost children of pink and blue war paint to their mother’s wombs. Pregnant apprehension sits in trailer parks of midwest fishbowl containers and the bubble ejects fumes of buried yearning.
Sex-trafficked princess turn over in dusty Tangier motel beds using strips of Seventeen magazine to test the syringe. Clans of adolescent guerrillas take aim and blast through flesh and concrete to seal manhood, their fingers squeezing the trigger to the cadence of their misplaced libido. And all the while the drums carry you home to what arson has left you. Primal lighting in the dark.
more by SANDY DODGE
photograph by unsplash
