1. How Green Your Face
Feelings of positivity engendered in the atrium took a dark turn later in the day when we encountered the red dog from Paul Gaugin’s famous painting but also Gauginesque women in various states of dress, billowing fragrance and jingling like little bells. After decades of the same nourishing but flavorless dish, one welcomes ghost peppers and near-toxic condiments. The loveliness flushed my cheeks—it was spring for fuck’s sake—but I played the asexual cretin and slobbered grotesquely as we passed the fluttering angels, gazing skyward like the Hindenburg had been revived and slowly slid across it, threatening inferno on the carnival below. In other words, I offered nothing to my eyes that would offend my companion. The pretense went unanswered till we came upon our house and entered silently. I switched on the lights and she screamed at me to switch them off. “I don’t want you to see me like this,” she said. I didn’t understand. She kept me in the dark till later, in bed. She asked if I still loved her. I said I did. She asked if I found other girls attractive and I said I did but that zeppelins really were my thing.
2. Burgundy Mohair Sweater
Put it in a silver paper box, stick it in a drawer, and save it for those times when you need the big gun, the holy silencer. It comes out with a puff and once the staticky fuzz relaxes, you hit Brandy’s Lounge on the Esplanade: all Tiffany lamps and zippered boots and black lipsticked pouts. The bartender with salt-and-pepper muttonchops and pewter paisley vest knows me from the past and in silence proffers the soothing green lantern of a Heineken. This is the telepathy I’d like to purpose in general. Imagine the advantages. I drink and belch into my hand. I drink and belch again. Beer disagrees with me and yet if I drink harder liquor I will metamorphose into a gibbering idiot and offend everyone within earshot. What everyone else imagines escapes me, and always will. Never mind confessions and the confessional mode. No one will forgive you for your sins except yourself. Tell me that after six of those magical bottles you can see everything through them. Everything is fuzzy and green.
3. Samy’s Brown Study
Don’t you wish you could resolve your emotional needs with money? Yeah, but what if you can’t rub two sous together? Then turn your pockets inside out and do a plaza moonwalk for gratuities—but there has to be a better way. Has she for instance ever validated your vocation? Not really? But she’s beautiful, I see. Heads turn, no guff. Dudes must think, What’s he got? A chateau? A yacht? A grand piano? White gloves and stripes will only get a fella so far in life. Well, we can add a validating pépite to the plot. Remember when she thought you were the coolest bouffon in town? Didn’t last of course. Being on all the time is a job for Lecoq. The face aches from all the pseudo-jollity it dishes. Or all the oleaginous juice drains from the melon and isn’t replenished. And then one day she says, “You’re sec, Samy. Sec. I’m in un déserte when I’m with you—hissing dunes, scorpions, and belching chameaus on the horizon is how I see you now. Your gestes mécaniques no longer move me.” And this is why Samy the resident mime assumes the pose of Le Penseur and sighs.
4. Celadon Ceramic Duck
It belonged to my mother, alas, so beloved when she walked the earth. So beloved when she lost her bearings and became a menace to herself and everyone around her. She had to go. Sad as it was, she had to go. I look at it now and think: It belonged to the woman who gave birth to me and several others I no longer understand and perhaps never understood. Ho, we fought over the trinkets and baubles that had ornamented our childhoods. “You never liked the duck,” one sister said. Another sister asked me what color it was. “If you can name it you can have it,” the sisters chimed. A younger brother screamed as if his pacifier had soured, that strapping young man. Wah wah, I want it now, I want it now. A brawl broke out beside the rose cremation urn between the younger brother and the middle one whom I’d not seen for years. The younger brother, trained in martial arts, made short work of the middle one. During the tussle, they kicked over the urn and spilled our mother’s ashes. Meanwhile, I snatched the duck and ran. “It’s celadon!” I cried. “It’s celadon, you morons!”
5. Fulvous Whistling Ducks
Ducks can whistle like sailors is the message, when nothing could be further from the truth, I would hazard. Ducks appear and reappear and there is no reason for the phenomenon that I could summarize in this space. Listen here, I am only capable of riding a bicycle now. I’ve forgotten just about everything else that used to mean something to me, like playing the clarinet. But now I ride my soda orange bicycle through the flapping banners and blue rays of the city like a madman. This is not to say I endeavor to be contrary: it doesn’t profit to start blazes or to be misunderstood. And yet, how to extemporize how black I feel inside? If someone were to run a sword through me, I’m convinced a tarry substance would ooze out. Calico Daisy eyeballs me as if my funky mood has caused her evening fantasies of gooning mice to fizzle out. What’s the matter with you? she asks with languid emerald eyes and I answer by half-shutting mine to show her that I’m fine, I’m good.
Salvatore Difalco's short prose has recently appeared in Nude Bruce Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and Cafe Irreal.