Soyos Shorts

  AUGUST 28, 2022 Share There are these days when the sky is dark but all else underneath seems, looks just as bright as if immediately after a late spring sunshower or right before a hurricane. I woke up late today, though, and don't know which this is. Only last year a tornado touched down on Old Best Road and it was the first to hit our county in over a decade. The world has already changed and I'm not so sure what to do. My father is the youngest of three by five years, my mother the second oldest of eight. In a beautiful Victorian house with commensurately ugly values my old man was brought up, and in a small home the siding of which was always well kept my mother spent her youth with a mother who worked and a father who once tried. She went to charm school and he earned an athletic scholarship to a D-1 university even further upstate.  My parents did not meet each other until they were in their middle thirties and had all opportunity not to have had to. Dad was scouted b...

  AUGUST 26, 2022 Share    It’s quiet up here. Picture an observation deck, over a container terminal at night. Except in this Port, there are no gangs of stevedores, nor cranes. The containers move on their own. At the birth of this technology, it took ten minutes to move a container. Now, you miss it mid-blink. I select the boxes that I need, and type the command. Nothing happens. I had to know it wouldn’t be easy to disappear.  *     “How much are we talking?"  I typed.     Then—     “Keep your bounty, Nemo. We’ll come for you when we need it.”      Like a fool, I breathed relief. I needed my earnings, for her. I have yet to figure out how to transmute them without flagging myself in the Port, but knowing they’re there makes me feel safe. The only reason I stayed this long is because I’ve tried to act as I would be treated; which is not only absurd because it’s Old World romance, but because few people wield the ki...

  AUGUST 22, 2022 Share   i.   Well. Here I am. Or am I?   A sunset inside me, soon to cede to the ghostly resonances of star and of moon. But can I help it? Can I do anything other than be? Can I think anything other than thought, feel anything other than feeling?   I have slipped on the soap of wisdom in the bathtub of the universe and cracked open my head. Or so it seems. Perhaps I’m better off like this, loping towards the light of an open door that I never reach. Perhaps I’m better off not being me (I think?). Oh well. Guess that’s that.     Yes.   That is that, and that is a fact. Perhaps. ii.   It’s almost noon, and the sun is bleeding truth.   I stroll into the day’s myriad potentialities. I am a figure of the future haunted by the present, heir to a thousand exorcisms, perennial guest at a banquet of ghosts. And yet, today nothing can stop me.   I stroll through a sun-daubed park, los...

  AUGUST 21, 2022 Share In a shelter of darkness, I gave a homeless man a cigarette And lit it for him.   The Sky would soon be on fire.   Teeth clenched, I feel myself falling Like tears carried by a light breeze Into the dreams of the boy, I left In the gauze of morning light, Watching the birth of clouds Into eyes, half-shut in sleep.   I  can’t bury  my ch ildhood It isn’t a corpse, that disintegrates Into the anonymity of nature.   It’s something stranger, harder to define.   People are paradoxes who will never understand themselves.   But maybe that’s my feeble  baby-shoot brain Stunted by the limited light and clear skies.   My childhood is a ghost, haunting The byways of my graved thought routes.   Then when joy is unshackled from the altars of  respectability, The urchin cast out when teenagers mocked me for still playing with toys, Returns and  the  know the truth, slurred by drunks in the back alleys o...

The first time I met Lucky he was lying in the middle of the road, holding up traffic and yelling, “My leg! My leg!” He was wearing scuffed, white sneakers, blue jeans, and a t-shirt with a few holes in it. Lucky’s face was slightly dirty, young enough that he didn’t have to start shaving yet, his dimples evident on his smooth face. They were in full effect as he grimaced, standing in front of the stopped car. “Are you ok?” I heard the driver say. I was standing on the sidewalk, watching the driver twitch slightly as he jumped out of his car. I didn’t see exactly when the driver ran into Lucky, I’d turned the moment I heard the driver screech on his breaks and Lucky let out that horrible yelp. Without responding Lucky rolled on the floor. He looked like a rolling pin, but with shampoo and conditioned, flowing brown hair. He was a particularly pretty man, who looked anywhere from sixteen to forty years old. “You came out of nowhere!” The driver continued. He began to pace slightly back ...

  AUGUST 4, 2023 Since he was able to again, after such a long time, he just walked. He went anywhere, not concerned where he ended up. Of course, he had wound up there. It was impossible he could be anywhere else. He scaled the wall. Now, it took him just mere moments. He pushed his elbows between the planks of wood. Inside they were hollow, he expected beetles. Inside, the tan bark was nothing but uniform. He could see small chips of wood that resembled the trees they came from. His big boots crunched as he walked. Somewhere in the courtyard children were gathering. He continued slowly across the brickwork. The buzzing of voices long ago had lost all association for him. Ripples from another world.   Since he was born, there was a stone in his stomach, one that hardened as he grew.   The old brick should have been coated with dust, it wasn't. Back then, he had always felt more comfortable inside the hallway, where he was alone. The carpet was a deep red; the strings pus...