Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip
Contents:
This is what can happen when a personal story of trauma meets the collective horror of an apocalyptic, true-life event: No doubt many people who intended visiting NYC at that time must have circled September 11, on their calendars it's a random date, after all , but how many of them had a been diagnosed with PTSD that same year, b planned to drive from the Pacific Coast of Canada all the way across the continent, and c were willing to do it alone? This fairly brief account of one man's solo journey is exquisitely personal yet undeniably universal in its haunting first-hand observations of the monumental changes wrought by the terrorist attacks.
An acute loneliness is transformed into something which, if not outright beautiful, can surely pass as inspirational. To Sweep the Light. Ahead Of The Game. The Man Behind the Mask.
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The Rattler and other stories. The Magic of Your Touch: The Emperor of Silence. Times They Were A-Changing. Surrounded by Gods, the Atheist Speaks. The Man with One White Shoe.
See a Problem?
Destructive Thoughts A Short Story. From "Short Cuts", a short story collection.
Zephyr of the Ashes. Noble Gas, Penny Black.
Smashwords – Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip - A book by David Antrobus - page 1
Jazz, Monster Collector in: A Friendly Place of Dying season 1, episode 5. Ride The Wild Worm. X is for X-mas. The Other Side Traveler Tales. Back To Work season 1, episode 7. My High School Reunion. Maze; Revenants; Chiaroscuro in Chalk: Living with the Brooklyn Bridge. Rock and Roll Poetry. The Brief Case of the Briefcase. She leaks from her own seams. This Pain Needs a Name.
I stare at the sky, eyes raw with grit, at this shroud of burnt orange and corpse-grey where blue once smiled its summer brilliance. The alien sun a faded blood-coin suspended within the rattling final breath.
Wanting rain, fearing squalls. Leaves and boughs caked in layers of sandy clay, encased like a warm dry antithetical ice storm. Nobody has been this way in weeks. I sent my children far, not from ego but the opposite. What have we here? A field in England. Absent colour or anything defining.
Sound of a bird, a two-syllable scream. Could mostly be anything. The monochrome ghost of a lapwing.
Unveiled, the razor stubble underfoot, foreground to a copse. Ploughed lines littered with fallen crows. Black-pepper dead things and mud, well seasoned. Oh, this is it. The land of nowhere. It's grey, and in that grey another grey partiti. In the gloom, a girl shaped from sparking ozone and her wild electric canine dance beneath a moon of cold bone and a dormant volcano. Ice floes crackle around them, splitting and snapping, glitchy as break beats spun by a frozen demon DJ.
All is blue or ozone-white. Voices weave in and not in. This tapestry of sound is torn, charged.
Similar authors to follow
Have you ever seen ice-smoke? The chill, fuming tail of the dog and the smouldering cold tendrils of her dress. Eliot, The Waste Land This boat is a sculpted incisor cutting the surface of the lake. A fierce sun debrides the foaming scars, and a stillness traps the heat beneath a sultry, birdless dome of exquisite blue. A near-naked woman helms the boat, lion-haired and hewn by toil and sunlight into a gleaming statue of bronze.
Her tawny-golden hair is a. He read the note by the side of the road, right after he got punted by the irate trucker. Handwritten, it said this: Boo, I love you an all. I cain't always be mad atcha. But you get right with your ownself or with God or maybe both. Then y'all can think about comin home and bein with me. Your trusty girl, Francelle Elesha Metcalf Even before the trucker picked him up, he'd found it folded in the small pocket inside his flight jacke.
She is bound on a cold stone floor in a spare cottage by a crag, the wind a tuneless piccolo through cryptic slits.
A flurry of dark birds arc jagged across a slate sky past twilight. The ink upon her arms and chest echo both flocks and sundown: Outside, some black and odious structure silhouetted on the cliff edge: Hallowed be her name. When she first came here—the skin beneath her hazel eyes smeared as if an artist had been learning charcoal, the eyes themselves almost pitiless—we called her Trashy, soon shortened to Trash. We meant nothing bad by that.
- Anne, Empress of Russia - A Short Biography;
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- The Migrant Type - Blog - This Pain Needs a Name.
- The Canal Builders: Making Americas Empire at the Panama Canal (Penguin History of American Life)?
- R.C. Drake’s review of Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip.
But Trash—Raylene—heard only bad. Today we'd call it slut-shaming, only we weren't slut-shaming anyone. Yet she felt slut-shamed. I still remember her. She kept going for the very same reason.