Howie Good
Depressed on Sundays
The road is barely a road at all, more a dirt track, but the man seems resigned to his plodding pace.
No one would ever mistake him for someone’s darling. He wears a borrowed coat that’s
too thin for the weather, his own coat having disappeared into the files of the bureaucracy. As he
walks, he thinks about the bad times and thinks about them and thinks about them. Ahead of him
looms a forest – beautiful if it weren’t for the casual desecrations by day trippers. The treetops
sway, an invitation to dance. No, he replies, I don’t want to.
​
Mortal Dreams
Your old sick heart is powering down, becoming hesitant and vague, indistinguishable. So you
board a train with the idea of appearing that night as a significant figure in another person’s
dream. The trip seems to take longer every time you make it. When you finally arrive, ballet
dancers rise on their toes. You don’t stop to admire their athleticism. The situation that awaits
you across town doesn’t allow for it. You flag a taxi, climb in the back, state an address. The taxi lurches into motion. By now it’s dusk, and the dead petals of the world are falling.
Postcard from America
Sleep has vanished. A low pulsing fear holds our eyes open in the dark. Any moment now, a gun
nut in body armor might step through a door carrying an assault rifle and start killing. I’m no theologist, or any other kind of -ologist, but if there’s a god, well, he doesn’t seem to care all that much about the future of his creation. Just today, as I got off at my stop, the stench from the
exhaust fumes and spilled garbage simmering in the heat was enough to make one think that hell must be located around here somewhere.
Empire of the Ants
He couldn’t have known that his long, thin face, with mottled skin and uncommonly big eyes, prefigured my own. A boy from the shtetl without rights or prospects, he stole back his life when he deserted on a shrill night from Franz Josef’s battered army. That country no longer exists, having been overrun by gentlemen in tail coats and then devoured by crows and ants. If you go searching for it – in books, on old maps, under bridges, in the ruins of a wedding-cake palace –
you will find only a confusion of names and the directionless footprints of drifting shadows.
People and Places
The Kids Are Alright
This morning Celeste was singing one of her songs. She stopped suddenly and said, "Why do I always fart when I sing?" Then a centipede fell on Russell's neck. He hurled it to the floor and its death. The small fires will be extinguished, but the big fires will go on.
Moon Shot
You live in an apartment that occupies half the second floor of a faded Victorian house. The other second-floor tenant has taken off his clothes and walked off into the distance. Nothing wrong with that. As much as it’s great to say, “We’re going to the moon,” there’s someone who actually has to get on that rocket and get blown up, maybe.
America, America
​
It’s a test of some sort, must be, one that involves black smoke seeping in, the roof possibly being on fire. We continue working regardless, hands pulling levers, hands slapping buttons, hands making the same demands over and over. Our eyes start to sting from the smoke, our throats to scratch and burn, but none of us is ready to give up just yet. This is our garden, I guess.
September Song
Out the window the sky takes on an ominous greenish tint, as if God, in a temper, were rudely offering us his back. I can practically feel my heart rate rise in response. We’re always evolving, always becoming something, but never quite getting there, one of those goddamned stories
without an obvious beginning and a definite end. It’s embarrassing in a way to want so little for
us, just someplace that’s got a pool table and a jukebox, where old bandits and pirates carouse
until closing and a fat yellow cat curled up asleep in the corner keeps indifferent watch.
Howie Good is the author most recently of What It Is and How to Use It from Grey Book Press and Spooky Action at a Distance from Analog Submission Press. He co-edits the journals Unbroken and UnLost.