There's Always Room For One More

For a second there, I thought you might be the buffalo. But then I realized that a moose would never wear a hat. They are stubborn and gentle monsters.

Or, maybe, if you think about it, we're all buffalo.

I lost count of who is dead in the pond and realized it won't matter in the end. I had built a campfire, I had set up a small tent, I oiled my shotgun. There were branches and vines starting to push in on me, trying to get into my mouth, my ears, into my eyes, trying to reach down my inner canals to the barren crevice where my dried crusty heart pumped gross black sand to my heaving organs. My machete made quick work of those plants; I threw them on the campfire. I cooked beans and hominy.

Over there, down in the pond, were bodies. Everyone's body. Even mine, I guess. Down at the bottom, looking up from the mud. When you push your toes down deep in the mud, your arms around a firm masculine waist, and you feel the squish and the cold over your feet, I am that squish. Who was here first? The moose? Or me? or you? Or your man? Or your girl? Either way, we welcome the next addition. Your flesh gets gunky and feeds minnows. You pine for your red hat. Maybe you hear a shot gun blast and there's some splashing up at the surface. Or maybe that already happened and it keeps going through your head, and there's a feeling of not exactly guilt.

I feel like I know you sometimes. After I extinguish the fire, I get in my tent. I get ideas. I think mostly about the pond. About the buffalo. There are animals devouring things outside. In the trees and the pond. Everything is quiet except for their mating and eating noises. The sounds are so gross. And they keep going. They're persistent. I put my head under the pillow and pretend I hear you calling for me from the pond. Or maybe I'm the one doing the calling.


By Gerard Olson

But Of Course Cupid Is A Hunter

In the middle of your story, you called the buffalo a moose. Was that on purpose? Because it makes me pretty certain you don't believe your own words. I think you dig nature. Your tongue slipped out and I could tell from the fire's twinkle in your eyes, you held yourself back from chopping it off with that rusty machete you keep sliding into the dirt.

Once, when I was strolling upon the heath, I came across a rosy patch of blackberries. The perfume spat in my face and I ate from the bush for hours. I picked bunches, spread them on the grass and threw my body on them and rolled around until I was smashed with bloody patches. Spinning and spinning until it showed. Then I let go of the ground to allow a swarm of flies to defecate on my skin. If I'd slipped and tumbled off the hill, sunk to the bottom of a lake by the weight of rocks plugging my nose to suffocate my life off, would I be mad that some wanderer would find my red cowboy hat on top of the hill and stolen it away smirking at luck's fortunate gift? No. They'd thank the clouds, pick a few berries, with a new hat on their head, and skip away.

Let's say your buffalo is a moose. Before hitting the pond or lake or whatever, it passed through a vine thicket. Seven-inch thorns ripped its horns clean off its head with exacto-knife precision. The moose, being so large and heavy, kept plummeting to its watery fate, but the horns remained, dangling, suspended in the thicket. Then some carnivorous parrots or parakeets smelled the tendrils of flesh leaking from the horn's roots (because the thorns cut some of the moose's head off, the meaty part connected to the eyes perhaps swinging in the breeze). These birds came from opposite ends of the valley, one from the sea, another from the forest. Meeting here, they pulled at the same bloody tendril, like a noodle, and the story ends with the touch of their lips.

If I was the hunter, I would stalk for fruity scents, and I'd ask, out loud, to the world, to my imaginary friend, Is that your man right there? Is that your girl right there?...Just shoot 'em down. Just shoot 'em down!...Then I, now the one with buckshot in my eyes, would say, I think I feel a little hurt. Love is such heartache all the time. I'm a fool for you, cupid, you poison-tipped hunter, you.


By Daiana Feuer

The Ghost of the Pond

Somewhere, there is a freshwater pond at the bottom of a hill. The pond is not shallow, you cannot see the bottom. It is idyllic, probably.

Years ago, a buffalo that was grazing the blackberries at the top of the hill was shot down by a hunter. Buckshot pierced its eyes, it bled. Tendrils of red flesh trembling from its wrecked neck. It stumbled away, down the hill, into the pond, where it sank and died. Its carcass has been picked away by turtles, fish, bacteria, worms. It is barely left, now, these days. The moose is part of the pond, microscopically. Its nutrients were consumed and shat out and consumed again and shat out even smaller. In that way, it is a ghost that engulfs you when you go swimming with your boyfriend, nude probably, pressing your skin against his skin to keep warm in the cold water. In that way, you are complicit in the violence of the buffalo's death.

That is a metaphor, by the way.

Even deep love is tinged with sacramental violence. Obviously.


By Gerard Olson
Photo by Daiana Feuer

We have cancer.

by downtown bar photo booth

Monsters!

The Cat You Loved

Did I ever tell you, dear, that the cat you loved wasn't killed by coyotes? It didn't run away and I made all those signs with the one picture we had, knowing.

You see, I was sitting on the couch, watching the Colbert Report (the Rapport, you know!), and she lept into my chest and disappeared. It's stupid.


by Eric Lindley
photo by Daiana Feuer