1 story
by Sasha Fletcher
Sasha Fletcher is the author of the novel Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World. He lives in Brooklyn.
CERTAIN DOOM FUCKS YOU IN THE END
The Recently Dusted rides the curb to the street, dodging clouds, trailed by birds. In their wake is chaos and ahead of them is certain doom and on their neck is written the future. The Recently Dusted makes their way to the park, ollieing off the fuckin eagles atop the columns which still stand still way the fuck up there, grinding down the tree line and across the lake while the geese stare in awed silence. Then the geese explode. There's confetti everywhere, and smoke. The colors change. That's just how it fuckin goes some times out here! The confetti and the smoke and their brand new colors merges into a cloud of confetti and smoke that shimmers and coughs behind our hero's board. It coughs up secrets too terrible to hold onto, which is why it coughs them up. How many of us have looked at our balance with dread in our hearts? How many of us have nearly thrown up when we saw where we stood? The Recently Dusted pays their bills with bills they dig out the pockets of their pants which leave almost everything to the imagination because without that then what the fuck do you have? It's not like you own your bones or your blood, your skin replaces itself over and over again, you're losing your hair, you're losing your money, you lose it every day, your money, where has it gone???? This is why the Recently Dusted dodges clouds. I don't need to tell you about the birds. The Recently Dusted dodges some birds right on into the bodega with the slurpee machine and slurps a slurpee so cold God would sigh, and God does, sigh, right then and there. There’s no one else in the bodega. It’s a ghost town. The whole town is full of ghosts! They’re walking around in their bones and fucking, it’s noisy, it’s a white noise, it’s soothing, ghosts tied to bones don’t need to eat, there’s no point, they love to dance, the ghosts tied to bones, under the streetlights, which someone still turns on every night and off every morning, the sunrise a frightening pink and the sunset a sick sort of orange, like it’s not well, that orange, someone should really help it, and the night sky has a hole in it. There was a story once that that was where dreams come from, but that isn’t true. I’m sorry. It just isn’t. Across the street and a hundred years ago there’s an apartment and on the third floor there’s a set of windows and if you look into them you can see a huge green aglaonema and a small peperomia and you can see a giant snake plant poking up from the floor and in another window there’s a big dracaena and a medium fernwood snake plant and in another window there’s a smallish red aglaonema and a medium sized moonshine snake plant and you can see past the window there are two people, dancing, you can almost hear music, the sun is setting and they are bathed in light, they are dancing through the living room, stirring the pots on the stove, still moving, one rests their head at the other’s neck, lips find skin, find a mouth, the burners are screaming, the pots need attention, it’s fine, it’s all fine, everything, right now, in this moment, is fine, and if it never ends, then that’s what happens, it never ends, this moment, and we can live inside of it forever. In the sky is a hole where your dreams go. Everything around the Recently Dusted is the darkest blue they’ve ever seen, the stars are hung from the air, slowly dying, singing their songs. In the end, certain doom always fucks us. Our bones keep going with our ghosts clinging to them, walking out our memories until our bones are dust and our dust is in the wind and then that’s it, we’re gone.