My boyfriend’s wife was a remarkable beauty. She came into my mind when I was driving, or cutting clumps of wheatgrass to feed to the juicer at work, or lying in bed at night. Her name was Bianca, which was a name that could only belong to a beautiful woman. I was scrolling through her Instagram page when a text from Sukie interrupted me. “Thought of you today. I backed up into a car and drove away without leaving a note.” What the fuck does that have to do with me,
Samantha was struggling to focus on her biology PhD— her grandpa had just died from a long battle with an obscure form of cancer, and then there was the shambolic crash of the death metal band raging in the opposite building, disturbing her dreams.
As the noise rattled her skull, Samantha recalled her grandpa’s luminous eyes and ruthless nature — he was a big game hunter and he’d travelled the world killing rhinos and elephants,
There was never nothing; nothing never begat nothing. That was my first belief, though. Above all, I believed in the abyss from which I’d emerged. The miraculous product of a void multiplied by another. To divide a limitless field, I set a camera on my shoulder. A doubling device containing nothing became my center. From two zeroes (my camera and the void I set it on) came one two: the image proved the existence of an original something.
My ghost looks at my to-do list. “What is the meaning of this?” it says. The list does not respond because no sound occurs to the list. The list is not a brain with ears or instrument of any kind. Neither is my ghost yet my ghost keeps talking.
It looks at my browser history: “What is the meaning of this?”