Day of The Bombing
Khary Bello at the boardinghouse window. Morning. Tattered side city. Scattered sky clouds. Small hunger. No voices. August.
Streetside, shoes cracked, he walked. Each day the same. Walk the old districts for a small job for a small coin. Sweep out a doorway. Throw a bag of trash in a pile of other bags of trash. Pity work for an old man, but he managed. On occasion thrived.
On the sidewalk a hatch opened in his mind and a voice dropped in that spoke in broken tiles and sparks from a bench grinder. It grated out the word bomb and Khary Bello put his hands to his head and whispered oh god.
He thought to tell a cop but he knew it was too late to save shattered victims they would deadlift from the rubble. It was too late for those who ran with redscream on their faces. The world coughed tragedy from its tainted lungs every dying day and Khary Bello was just one man. One man in a world of calamity.
The bomb had struck a hotel next to the park on the Avenue of Immortals. Khary Bello steered his feet in that direction to view the aftermath. A small spider of dread climbed his throat but he swallowed it down with the relief that death hadn’t taken its shot at him this day.
Things not as he thought. Children chased a ball in the park and laughed. Taxis stopped at the hotel. Two women spoke calm. A cop leaned on a wall.
Where is the bomb? Khary Bello asked the cop and the cop said what bomb? The one I heard. No bomb here, beat it. The hotel bomb. Are you okay old man? I’m fine, said Khary Bello and the cop said then beat it. The world coughed up unwell people every dying day and the cop saw Khary Bello as just another glob of the sickness.
Black and white not the same as color, said Khary Bello and walked away.
He knew what he meant even if cops did not. Cops spoke only the language of rules and not of imagination or of ancestor voices and shared humanity. Khary Bello spoke of things both past and yet to come. A rainbow of possibility, a continuum.
Later they would examine another spilled casket of anguish and then wish they had heeded an old man with broken shoes. But he left the thought of future victims beneath the stained blankets of his belief and continued. He helped move a few boxes in the garment district, and with the coins he earned bought a bowl of soup and bread.
That night he lay awake in his cheap room with a warm breeze through the window and waited for a hatch to open in his mind but only silence. The curtain fluttered.
Next day the city wept for the bombing that killed woman and men and children and bellboys and cops in the hotel next to the park on the Avenue of Immortals but Khary Bello said nothing to anyone. Even if authority did open their ears to his prescience they would likely consider him perpetrator with an awakened conscience rather than oracle. Besides, he couldn’t say how it worked. Voices cracked open his mind on their schedule, not his. And sometimes they merely muttered. Babylon.
That’s how it was for Khary Bello. Lost. An inauspicious visionary. Chaotic. An unknown presence in a world that coughed out anonymous faces every dying day. Streetside, shoes cracked, he walked, looked for a job of no consequence. He low circled the mournful city for a small coin.
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The City of Open Air Asylums
Nothing existed before his blindness. The past too was sightless. For uncounted time he lay enclosed in darkness alone with disjointed thoughts in his dark world. A voice said wake and he stood, a boy in a lighted room next to his father in bed who slow exhaled a tubercular life. A voice said sleep and again his eyes fille…
None of This Makes Sense
The man came home. Like many do. Tired of his job. His life. The rent due and a bank account barely. A movie on TV and he watched it without watching. Some old black and white thing about a man who came home to a satchel of money in his bedroom because he had robbed a thief.
Plenitude
There he stood, Simon Favela outside in the rain, looking up to clouds with no expectation of bread. None at all. He had hunger but bread didn’t fall when clouds rolled with rain. Bread only fell on clear days into arms and baskets of people who lived only on bread. Good bread and vital.
This is really well written, particularly the way you strip out unnecessary words - is that called asyndeton? Is it going to end up as a fantasy/imaginative fiction? I think that would be a shame - I like it as it is - a sort of downbeat magic realism I think - Oh yeah and 'redscream on their faces' sounds like something out of Blood Meridian and there is no higher praise than that in my house
A whole universe packed into a handful of tight paragraphs. No parts wasted. Nicely done.