The Dinosaur
after Augusto Monterroso
The tip of the tail (a barb almost, dripping with rainwater) gleams despite the intervening clouds and leaves as sunlight plays on its back, continuing, while the storm passes on, along its skin and spine, and arcs like the rainbow that has already begun to form, until it pools in the dip of the shoulders and climbs up the massive neck, which does have feathers—brightly colored, like a macaw’s—that sway as it moves, one coming loose and falling almost into my hand as the beast thrusts its head and open mouth through my window, into my room.
One Exception
I was to meet my family. They had never been arranged in the same room before. I’m told our characteristics are very strong: common features run in our faces. They were all very similar, or even the same. None of them looked different. I was amazed. When their mouths opened, they made the same noise. They were all the same height, which was different from mine. Their voices weren’t like mine. They didn’t look like me.
How We’ll Live Next
Your mom was always calling us in those days, things had not gone well with her, you were starting to dread it, how worried she was about her future, how she would ask if she could live with you, without saying it directly. The rent had gone up, left her without amenities, she was sitting alone too often, nothing to do, only PBS, no one she liked was left. You signed her up on a waitlist for Catholic Charities, you reminded her, they awarded housing, she certainly qualified, you didn’t say So you don’t need to live with me, and you can’t, and she said, It’s a three-year waitlist, there’ll always be someone ahead of me. You were hardly in possession of three rooms yourself. And the other waitlist? That’s for a skyscraper, she said, run by the Shriners—old people live there, it’ll be me, old people, and people with emotional problems, in a skyscraper. Well, we’ll all live in skyscrapers one day, you said, just yesterday I saw a book like that, how we’ll live next, multicolored skyscrapers growing in rows, vegetable patches all round, the water of a lake or sea lapping brightly at the corners, everywhere sunlight, small planes lifting off.
Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio, and edits fiction for The Dodge. His work appears in 3:AM, Epiphany, Cincinnati Review, minor literature[s], hex, and elsewhere.
Image: i.ytimg.com
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Heavy Feather Review 