Until I was twenty-two, I believed the faces of the sun and moon belonged to the same rock. I thought: when man first walked on the moon, he must have done it at night.
When my friends heard about this belief, they mocked me until they realized that no one had told them outright that it wasn’t true. Then one of them punched me. Laughing, he attempted to reassure us that we had all learned about such things in science class.
“Come to think of it,” one said, “I have seen the sun and moon together in the sky, on plenty of occasions.”
“So there’s your proof,” said another.
I agreed, nodding wildly. I had seen them together in the sky, too, but I had found a way to explain it: if you really looked, one or the other was always more duskily faded. Like a reflection in water.
“Or ice,” another said dreamily.
“You know, the Apollo astronauts trained right here in Iceland in the 1960s.”
We immediately bowed our heads in the direction of our quietest friend. I loved when this one spoke. We were careless listeners among each other, but when he spoke, we paid attention. We paid him the reverence that only Valur had ever earned from us, in those quivering post-match moments in the Hlíðarendi Stadium.
“My grandfather used to spy on their activities, combing the surrounding volcanic rock for cavansite.”
“Cavansite?”
“It had been discovered in Oregon earlier that year. He read about in Geology Magazine.”
We all stared at him blankly.
“In his old age, he became obsessed with finding this rare blue mineral. He would take my father on long walks, circling the training camp, whose presence had been corrupting his ideal of the black-ridged Icelandic landscape. My father remembers these walks, though he was very young, due to how completely alone he felt. My grandfather never said a word to him about the astronauts over the fence. Their mission, their freeze-dried food and microgravity training. All stuff which would have been fascinating to a child. He was too busy searching, and they had to search quietly. Every rock my father picked up glinted like a tooth, but it was never the right one. Never the prismatic royal blue contained in the crinkled magazine photograph, which was tacked to the mantle in his father’s workshop.”
“Did they find it?” I had to ask.
“Forty-three years later,” he said, lowering his eyes. “Another man found it.”
We all started thinking it- that his grandfather had died trying.
“You have to wonder… Was the cavansite there all along?” a boy asked, incorrectly, but we forgave him. He was careless with words, while I was usually not. And I had been mistaken about the moon.
I wondered if I would ever live it down, and that night I lay awake, dreaming of astronauts landing without sound as tiny snowflakes on black rock.
I twisted my neck out the window and aimed it at the moon.
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Marooned
I had made it to dry land, but the sea still swirled in my ears and throat. The memory of the mutiny was as fresh as the sabre wound on my chest.
The taste of my lover’s lips, indistinguishable from saltwater, from sand- now indistinct from that which coaxed his bright soul from its body, numb and unblinking. His pale face sinking into black water under a cruel shape of moon.
It was better not to be marooned. It was better to be both of our glowing, weathered faces- plunging deep and snuffed out along with the treacherous nature of our disgrace. You proved your love in arrogance, and I bit my tongue a thousand times trying to say it. I know this taste to be regret, and privateers’ mouths are full of it.
My love, there are things that I wish I had done differently… Beginning with: why the hell can’t two people fit on one floating door?
– originally publ. on flashfriday.wordpress.com
The Pharmacy
She was in line at the pharmacy when the lion came along and swallowed her whole.
The beast roared and her pills spilled all over the floor.
This is the Opening Paragraph of My Autobiographical Novel as a Wealthy British Man who has grown Long in the Tooth
It later occurred to me that had I awakened that morning not as a hysterical prisoner of damp and twisted sheets, but having instead been deposited by some dreadful means into the scene of a recurring nightmare. I shouldn’t have regarded the day’s events as any less extraordinary, for by that afternoon, I would find my circumstances so frightfully confused that I wondered if I might have fared better as the doomed victim of my own tragic hallucination. Disturbed as my condition was, the prospect of a watery grave had grown increasingly attractive, and I wished desperately to be stirred into the reality of that slight, trembling boy balanced precariously against the cliff’s edge, whose terrible anguish had the haunted, distanced quality of a dream. Resignedly helpless to the brutal activity of crashing about the jagged rocks, salty thunder swirling inside my skull- consistent with the unforgiving manner with which the wind had taken to whipping about my helpless form. As it happened, the day could not have got off to a more unremarkable start, save the noisy rattling that had quite suddenly begun in the old house, startling myself (and, I believe, the house, for she groaned as if to explain that she, too, had slept fitfully).
The Family Meeting
“My vote is for coleslaw,” Greg announced to the table, sliding his green thumb along the edge of the placemat. Dad snorted, opening and closing his fist as if he held a great clump of fertilizer in his palm. Why we needed to have a family meeting for this was beyond me, but I sat in my chair anyway and twisted my ivy hair to make sure that Mom could see that I was bored out of my tree.
“Violet? Honey, we need your vote…” Mom gave me a kind of pleading look and I saw that her eyes were the colour of milk bottle beach glass. I rolled my eyes and got up to leaf.
“Violet! Sit down this instant. Finish your spinach.”
“F*ck you, Mom. You never cook what I want.”
“Well, what is it you want?” Mom groaned, pretending to hang herself with a green onion noose. Greg and Dad went hysterical. Dad laughed so hard that his big belly bumped up against the underside of the table. His brussels sprouts hopped up and down on the plate, rolling out in a dozen different directions.
“I want eggplant, tomorrow night. And you’re all going to eat it right along with me.”
“F*ck you, Violet. That’s far too exotic. Do you think money just grows on trees?”
I could just kill them.
long live the martyr 