33 sentences from Opaquely A, one per chapter, selected by the author – Curtis Eggleston
June 1, 2025
1
They entered separate cars, and now Sasha was driving home, to the apartment he despised, not for lack of space but for the feeling that settled on his skin there, that the longer he stayed over any day or night became intolerable, erosion by disquiet like undryable mist, whether he did pushups, smoked cigarettes or sat on his patio rail, squinting up at streetlamps so they resembled moons, and so driving he hoped to enjoy his last hour of not yet being there—he tried the appeal of car speaker melody, but sick of his own music, killed the song and rocked to the 405 hypnosis, accelerate and slow, taillight reds deadened and starkly illuminated, feeling impelled, and depressed, before trying to think himself around it, with how far he’d made it from humble Montana, raised on ranches, horses, snow, real mountains and land, land, how, after seeing the first photo of Raeen’s he had decided he would work for him, if he had to break his back to, he’d study under him, how he had prayed to get out of state, no career where landscapes shaped like heaven, where wildlife would stop for him and pose, where he’d spent a solitary year, saran wrapping his flash with different tones, casting alien reds onto horses’ eyes like reflective fear wrought quasars, or shot blizzards for their violets, and trick of depth of flake to flake held faces live of contrast, or in heat climbed through sap to capture bald eagles hatch in woven aeries, or waited in shouldered grass for devout gusts to bow blades into kissing in humility the soil, in unison in prayer, praying please, God, allow me out of here, to Los Angeles, where I can make a name like Raeen, Raeen—Sasha braking, slowing mechanically, avoiding rear ending a Ferrari with plated vanity “UWISH,” remembering the morning he’d packed up and driven to Sherman Oaks and couch surfed strangers’ lint-wrought cushions, online connections like synapses strung of Matter DMs, posting years’ worth of work from Montana until Raeen had noticed, and Sasha had cried at the message—I’d like to hire you as my intern—eight months ago, now, Sasha driving through a four-year wish appeased, reviving past livelihood Montana, waist deep in waders casting for chinook salmon, wading through a blank, unpromised future, unsure what even was there to photograph here in LA besides skeletal girls or plastic-thick girls and their clothing priced like furniture, and Raeen, Sasha’s old god, in pain, having lost his brother, while Sasha pulled into his apartment complex, into the horror parking garage of light flicker and fans to eat exhaust, entered an elevator floor daily shared, procured in the mirror in his eyes for echoic vessel’s theater, and while unlocking his apartment door, and scrambling peppered eggs with a side of spinach for dinner for one, he began to think bigger, focusing a pressure to be the best photographer ever himself, but not before writing ideas for Raeen, his key to mastery primary homage paid to his LA mentor, avoiding the nag of nostalgia for fresh air and mountain cold water vapor, hearing now not the wind through needled branches but the hush of passing distant infinite interstated cars instead, while Sasha, eating, spaced relaxed, before Sasha, focusing, became distracted, glancing through other photographers’ profiles on Matter until sudden dark outside found Sasha lain, sifting through sleep frustrated, written on his mind, how will I be a legend like Raeen, until Sasha woke, opened Matter, to read trending news, first morning action, headline: Famous LA Photographer Aged 40, Deceased, Suspected Suicide, Raeen Link—words unchanged while Sasha read and reread the strange shapes of letters not supposed to align, expository phrases unmade of sense but instead like poetic language conjured onto his mind’s eye silhouetted elk herds, grazing in thick morning fog in fall, hooves clocking hard against cold soil, leaves crack into dust after toil of grow green and redden and release and float and twirl.
2
The two boys stood on liquidity of time—Sasha sprayed across widths of droplets, small, many, imprecise, forwarding divided to potentials, their origin, why—Dayton tided backward, sliding to recapture a competitive recollection, envisioning in the stairwell a playful of light, brutalist, yet sinuate photo, how he might convey from smooth metal a sense arboreal, before Sasha could ideate its equal.
3
Patterns hailed upon his idle brain; he saw scales, he saw light tinders radiate symmetry, limning an artifact darkness with rutilated, atavistic memory: he used to steal, and thought he balanced karma with donated bounty; supplicants outside supermarkets more deserved granola bars than chief officers mourned their disappearances, but Abner stole pottery too once, on a Canyonlands trip with his parents, no whole vase, but a triangular jag that when set upon his palm settled framed by the lines fated to him, as if the relic might adhere to his skin, as if whatever taken he was meant for, fatalism ever at hand—he believed in curses, but could not bring himself to return the clay piece, no matter where he lived he would awaken at night to hear the screams of what he knew was a mountain lion couldn’t be there, in Utah, but Los Angeles never, funny he should be here now, along a sick parallel while spiritually perpendicular to little brother Raeen, Raeen, two years younger and better equipped for grateful living, humble only noticed when you’re better, latter son will learn to win his father, no one finer copy than your brother, Abner used to steal, and until Raeen had picked up a camera himself, he had wanted nothing more than to be a photographer.
4
“…suicide feels like a murdered-out mood board…”
5
He lifted the joint between them like tangible luck, caressed his eyes with his mind front into glossed sincerity.
6
Only one soul fits inside a body.
7
Genesis, a black bird, the sum of forests in her eyes, thanked Abner.
8
Allura swayed, ladled up, served into the bowl of herself—heroin’s liquid elliptical high—at her mother’s funeral.
9
Salem loved all rains.
10
Excessed sides depleted her—she had struck her balance, cocaine and Xanax leaned back hooked their fingers.
11
Allura watched Lenny’s soft skin tighten against the tendons in her neck as she spoke, forming a hollow just above the top of her sternum, a space Allura thought to put a finger in, an invitation made of space alone—a thought she killed.
12
Two entitled kids, probably trust-funders, inviting whoever could get the most famous the fastest to stay at their Hollywood mansion.
13
The senses so sensitive for fear of loss of them, and this for fear.
14
But within a warm breeze bore cools, a sense of contradiction—something terrific was coming.
15
Pictures of himself, all, outfitted well past dysfunctional and back into usefulness, cutting-leg-holes-into-sleeping-bag territory, but designer frilled and hooded, handstitched, neon or all white, off-white or cumulonimbically rainbowed, with reciprocal backdrops, e.g., a marine-colored fit, boots-pants-jacket, aqueously rippling skyward with MediRare perched on a fire hydrant.
16
She, Abner, and Clara heard playlist sadness pure, beautiful, resigned soul company, acoustic flame and the female songwriter’s voice like melted ringing.
17
In his closet, an unworn grail, the Sook So 1/1 Martian Stormproof Parka, draped on his bamboo hangar, was gathering clout.
18
He wandered the neighborhood mentally whistling, recognized the soft of his own calm, the soft calm of owned recognition.
19
The deeper Allura breathed, the thinner she felt.
20
His Ex-Holiness, Ex-Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus, content as forever, posed on the bank of the River Anadyr, swathed in a coat sewn of bellies of sables at thirteen seconds to 2:12am, took a hit of meth—a bitterness one comes to love—watched through frozen night to boreal spirals caped in gradience, red to green—a phenomenon attributed to science and named after gods—and blew out his hit into moonlessness, and reclicked on the stoolside lamp to illuminate his panel, dipped his brush in tempera and detailed the foot of the three-barred cross, admiring his icon’s crown of aurora, and with a cool-dry breath pulled out his phone, and opened Matter; In old Sana´a, barefoot over desert earth, between cluttered walls of fired bricks and white gypsum, at thirteen seconds to 5:12pm, the boy, Zabeeb, looked up to rare droplets of evening rain—sunset breaks through clouds drew rose from walls of patterned clay—skipped into his father’s bazaar of aqeeq daggers and, untuned to the wet, soft patter outside, pulled his phone from his pocket, and opened Matter; An unscheduled cruiser, Brazilian police, ascended Rua Saint Roman toward Cantagalo’s base—a nine-year-old affiliate, Comando Vermelho, unrolled his kite to make aware Chefão—before fanwide bullets rained, and Francesca, owner of the noon buffet, could hide, at thirteen seconds to 11:12am, she opened Matter and saw, as no photography specialist but as a woman appreciative of proof of God, Dayton’s photo.
21
The night before she killed of her volition, Allura saw through and her naked self, healthy and rubescent in a naked field, she lay on her back, arms out, carrying sky blinked away.
22
I’d never need to speak or think again, for just one minute let them love me as beautiful.
23
She lifted her arms in the backscatter x-ray, could not help but flex her back, stretch, yawn—the scan measured radiation, and drew its own image, but failed to detect the opioid stillicide stomachward by heart, and radial, radial, runs through blood—to become a star.
24
He unscrewed the cap from her water bottle and tapped in an unmeasured dose of scopolamine into the liquid, returned the lid, and shook the bottle gently.
25
She illustrated and she lied, held back her tears, and told truths and lies she had not told anyone.
26
Truth is truth undescribed.
27
“A voice exchanges from somewhere higher in the mess of body soup with another and you are not hopeless and accept dying next to someone because their voice sounds like yours to you then.”
28
Cast outside the measures of his skin he saw, existed as one wilderness, as steam from below the earth, fumarole elation—as mesocyclone bands, heated, risen—condensed to rain and flooded as deposited alluvium he sunk into a plain, inhaled a hundred cycles and lay fertile as a thing unnamed—he grew into persimmon trees, abstracted into fruit, was chewed by a whitetail, swallowed, reduced, flushed along a stream and as particular prayers into an ocean he heartened in the brine, and floated—water to air, to water into ice, through triunity he fell across the taiga: pine breadths, branch-tight, staggered up hillsides caught the first autumn snow, and suffocating frost—all cooled, and there was no remainder.
29
Dayton learned more of his own eye from Golden, whose sustained silence, Dayton thought, enabled him to see.
30
“I’m hoping I can just see something beautiful, and just have a new experience that maybe guides me somewhere where I have some confidence in what I’m trying to do.”
31
The will to live erases all benevolence and fear.
32
I am sorry as the sun gets,
Raeen
33
Where awaited him he trusted and feared.