THE EXAMINED LIFE
tim horvath
The way we sized up truncheons was through use. We hastened into the breach—a town undermoon. Doors we splintered and, finding drapery within, shredded it to streamers, setting afire the limes and mojave sunrises and primaries that yearned to catch. We generated new ash while liberating old from urnature, smashing the urns to shards. Fanning outward, we slagged trinities in the wheat undertow. We feted out misbegotten dyadic dwellers; choosy husbands we punted, and in the presence of the newly-widowed then found ourselves stammering—impotent, rundown shutterbugs. In the aftermotes we stood, virginally contemplative, now stamened introverts. One of the survivors traced viaducts through her hair, irrigating her scalp with found fluids. Her coconut bangs had snagged on the underside of a scalloped roof that had teetered before capitulating. She was beautiful, as was her name, as was our dream, long harangued and now made hash, of coming into architecture, making habitation happen. “This,” we thought, “is where we have risen to wilt.”
Tim Horvath
www.timhorvath.com
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
Harold Brodkey