Shane Jesse Christmass

Did All Voice Vanish With You?
Just out of London a hundred-yard plank-road. They put dogs to death down there. Flat ground that’s as dirty as the rest of the footpath. Middle-class people generally shaking hands. Abandoned on the roundabout. A woman’s body in a magnificent pose. In my room a fold-up washstand and shaving-glass. It’s a lousy two-dollar heat. Drowsy Ph.D. candidates all in the cafeteria panting. Avoiding mention of him, and devoting our attention to intensely interesting affairs. Here is one of those coincidences, so much for currents, so much for tides and so on. A nail gun on the bedside table. Chlorine lording it over me. Tough smells from the swimming pool. Mediterranean watering places, saunas and sweat baths. I set the newspaper down and walk back to my room. I had a neat little rubdown. Waiter looks at me, bursts out my earlobes in high frequency tones. Nakedness. A slab of active, vigorous minds in active, vigorous bodies. No kids on Halloween came to the house. Too busy hovering over the face of the earth, crawling up mountains and flying through the region of Pernambuco. Floresto to be precise. Brazil even more so. Outside they sent me up to work. I learn by rote. Gold prospecting. For a couple of hours I’m absorbed. I believe in many things. The company pays for my services. Then we were in the Piazza Corvetto. A horsepower-racing machine on the backstreet. Engine getting busted in the grass. She came home from a convent in Brussels.

 

 

By Shane Jesse Christmass

(Melbourne, Australia) is the author of Acid Shottas (The Ledatape Organisation, 2014) and LAN Party Skate Park (Peanut Gallery Press, 2014). He's a member of the band Mattress Grave, and firmly believes that the future of the word, the novel, will be in synthetic telepathy...