Sense and Sensibility

Found Objects by Sherisse

The mood was festive inside the limousine: white cats and cocktails, Leila in a gold vintage dress, feathers and flowers in her hair, Oscar in a three-piece suit, his lips against an instrument. How sexy the night, the possibility of a new moon, an elsewhere kind of quiet.

Once, she had made him look away. She had pierced her nose, the following week her navel. The pain was alright. It hadn’t bothered her. It was a little bit like becoming someone else, entering the body of another and shedding your own. The tears had been involuntary, an intelligent glandular response. He hadn’t understood. For him, the acts had been about mutilation, betrayal, a too radical assertion of her autonomy.

Grateful for her belief in redemption, Leila offered Oscar the jewelry now, the metal that had once resided in her skin. From her palm to his, here it was, a humble gesture to mark the moment, to say, of all the ways that we empty ourselves this is one.

***

Dismemberment Plan by Alan

Wichita felt compelled to tell his family about the audible. While most people would be sending more inconsequential parts (small appendages, overlooked genitalia, etc.) up to sector S1V} in the spring, he decided he would choose the most rare and, indeed, risky business of sending up the heart. Actually, it had never been attempted, except by one brave woman who did so when the plan was first implemented, before the birth of the newest sun in the solar system and infinitely hotter days. The proper documentation was lost, intentionally obfuscated, or never really there in the first place - fuzzy details. All that was certain was the fact that she never "recovered" but was happier, generally, for it.

After his decision and the obligatory phone calls, Wichita, stepped into the cab parked out front. It would take him to the lab where the organ would be removed, loaded into the compression launcher, and hurled across timelines. The entire process would take the better part of a year, but what of mansion and hollow hollow cage? And what if the emptiness didn't take, went all plague on the encasement and left instead an exoskeleton, a shell of a man, which (in water) would duck and bob on the principles of waves.

Guys, if you're looking to get in on the ground floor of something really big, this is your chance. Look at Wichita, that beauty. Shifty,the dealer's mouth agape at his immunity. When everything he ever wanted in the old world was hung up on his walls and he had a choice, he made it and he made it big. We can give you a glory unimagined in all of human experience. It's a small price to pay. And now even this pulsating red beet of a thing. Look at him, how peaceful he is, staring off into a series of two dimensions for the future of your planet and for ours...for science, ultimately.

***

Bucketize by Lyle

He always had his bucket with him. Ever since late in the year, since the snow banks really started laying into themselves, which is to say, earlier than usual, he’d had his bucket. And today he considered buying his mother a cat. That she had been dead many years (and hated cats) did not enter into it as much as the snow — was it the snow? — did.

“Don’t create a fake verb like bucketize from the noun bucket.”

He had come across that somewhere (one of the technical books on his night stand?) some time ago. He had always understood inherently about the noun bucket, but it was the first he’d seen it written. That was were he had gotten the idea of buying his mother a cat. Reach into the noun bucket. “Cat.” “Mother.” At first because of the order he had thought catmother. But that was too startling. Too close to his cat-hating mother. So then mother cat and since it was a noun bucket and not a verb bucket — ridiculous! — a cat for his mother was it.

At his mother’s grave, he placed the kitten in the snow hole he had dug, covered the hole and left. The wind dampened the muffled mewling of the kitten.

The noun bucket next to him on the bench chose his stories for him.