by Rupert Wondolowski

Just as regular as a clock can tick you reach up for the old pigskin high on a dusty shelf as the sun is setting and the light is becoming gray and pointillist and your hand brushes an old Halloween mask. You pick up the mask, but it's slippery and brittle at the same time and you realize it's an actual face. As you drop it and collapse to your knees little songbirds jet up from the wrinkly folds and warble to you with outdated pre-recorded answering machine voices. Your mother calls to you from downstairs that dinner's ready, but she's been dead for five years now.

Your brother used to be able to imitate your grandmother's voice perfectly, breaking your heart when you came home from school to what you thought was an empty house, but then there was what you thought was the treasured voice of granny. Your brother could never imitate your mother, though, and the last anyone's heard he's currently hiding in a polar grotto below the visible pattern of the natural world, going by the name Red Reflectors On a Tree Stump. The manifesto he issued to the press, which now consists of a bunch of slightly above average intelligence junior high students sending out a bunch of emails grading events or personages either "stinky", "not stinky" or "chill", states simply "Ouch".

The scene on the small street outside does nothing to calm the beating of your heart or settle your emotions. Everyone is sitting outside their homes, it is a beautiful early fall evening after all, but they are so still and their eyes are all covered over with lid flesh and sloppy hand-stitching. No one seems bothered by this state, in fact no one is moving or saying anything at all.


Rupert will be performing his work at WORMS on March 16.