Instrument of doom, Hot honey, A Masterpiece of a Field
by Shane Kowalski
Instrument of Doom
The instrument of our eventual doom only plays three notes. And only at night. But they are notes that can only be played by a person who has experienced a certain amount of…experience. Nobody has experienced that amount though! And even if they did, there is nobody who knows what the three notes are, so this very experienced person would just be endlessly trying three-note combinations. Almost forever. Which would end up creating some very lovely melodies. Enough of them to live out the rest of our lives too.
1
Hot Honey
It’s too hot to think. So I think of you. Each bead of sweat on my body is a tiny animal. Which reminds me that sweat has memory…
That wet cloth that I used earlier to wet my forehead is steaming in the next room. Where are you even?
I think I’ll finally wake up some day, out of the hot honey of sleep, and find out my life turned out to be one long dream you’ve been having in some distant summer…
2
A Masterpiece of a Field
A light comes on in the middle of the night and bathes the hallway in a triangle of orange light. The crispdusk air is like reading people’s private correspondence. It takes a while to fall asleep, but it feels nice. Yougo over it and over it, inspecting it like a miracle just performed by a man in a fedora. But seriously! In thesame time as those first few memories of falling in love, there existed a field—a masterpiece of a field!—silently and slowly just being a field…
Shane Kowalski lives in Pennsylvania. His first book of short fiction, Small Moods, is forthcoming from Future Tense Books. He works for the United States Postal Service.