AT THE STOA

It’s always the fish.  One time, a time of happiness, perhaps, or hopes of a normal life together, my partner and I bought a fish, on a whim.  We were eating in a cafeteria, and while waiting for our sisig to grace our table, I told him I’d visit the pet shop next door.  Whereupon I laid eyes on the usual wares: fish, birds, Guinea pigs, rabbits. I remember my nephew, as always - he had wanted a rabbit in our previous home, and I was adamant to say no every time, since I would be the one to end up feeding and cleaning after it, knowing how he kept his hours. Plus I think stressed rabbits eat their young. That rabbit would have inherited all my stress and eaten its own sperm.   I spot the betta in their individual tanks, and my eyes delight in their colors: one was pure deep red, maybe like the color of the most beautiful flower in Sir Pratchett’s ocean; several were cobalt blue. Then I saw what was eventually to become christened in my house as Sisig - a betta so var...

I just sleep. I sleep to rest, to be away from the world that has given me so much and that I am not a part of anyway, to reset, to die. If only for a while.  I wake up and look at my phone, as all of us do now. The world painfully worlds, with no pauses and preambles: it elbows you in the face with all its glory, its vapid bitches, and all the iterations of the Andrew Tates of humankind. In everything we have a choice, save for one: this world. It is the ultimate given, the ultimate, ungentle, fact, and that we are in it. It doesn't stop. It can't; it doesn't have to. Immediately upon waking I close my eyes and dive deep into the recesses of whatever that was young that's left of me to desperately hunt for reserves of a desire to get up from bed, to work, to be . Two days ago I joked with my lover that I had been tired since 1984, and I think I mean it.  If not for him and another friend that gave me the time of the day in the MMORPG that I returned to, I would have ro...

  Seven hours later, the dying notes of Far Out and Karra’s Constellation were abruptly broken by Bjørn’s call blasting through my headset. After Erik’s call ending our conversation and me looking at my phone, I put it away, went to my desktop, and looked at my workload for the day. Another long day, for which I am thankful: work, like dishes, keeps me sane and drowns the cacophony normally in my head. “I’m leaving in two weeks,” was the first thing Bjørn said in the voice call. Having too many things happen all at once made me constitutionally unable to react to his pronouncement. He continued, not hearing my stunned silence, or perhaps not thinking anything of it, “Captain Josef of the Florence encountered rough seas on their run, and his first mate has been hit on the head by a crab pot. He had to be medevac’d the one thousand two hundred-mile distance to the nearest land.” “The Florence ? Another red king crab vessel?” “Not mainly. It hauls skrei off of Skarsvag and...

  I was to about to read the second piece out loud, which starts with an epigraph from Jacques Derrida’s A Silkworm of One’s Own , but then suddenly, and painfully, remembering not what I wrote but the style in which I wrote the piece, I stopped. I hoped Bjørn didn’t notice. Let’s put it this way: it was way worse than me harping on and on about the sea when I was younger. No one should be put through that. My youthful pretentiousness is a sight no one should have access to, put under duress or not. So I settled for the epigraph: I have promised. A lapse of time: it was only an interval, almost nothing, the infinite diminution of a music interval, and what a note, what news, what music. The verdict. As if suddenly evil never, nothing evil ever, happened again. As though evil would only happen again with death – or only later, too late, so much later. “Anyway,” I said, echoing him, “what I think of when I do of home is that apartment in Manila ten years ago where I lived...

Watch me gather leaves, and bits of broken armor, and words, and memories of fucking, and shape them into  a forest of my own making. Stay a while and see, ephemera laid on the anvil of my mind and slowly become monoliths,  undeniable and always real. Listen  as my voice finds my voice and joins the thunderstorm, a music you do not know. Know, finally, that in all this creation comes a god beautiful and terrible and alone.

 I need to go home. For the past three weeks I have been subjecting myself to inordinate and ultimately irrational amounts of writing, working, and increasingly less sleep.  Let me explain. I never thought I had a short story in me, much less three. The first one was special; it was the first one I ever wrote, never thinking I could sustain a plot line to save my life. The second one I wrote nine chapters of in one day. The third one was a cruel kind of child: it nearly took all of me and my decreasing work hours and demanded that it be clothed in words I was losing more and more. When it was done I felt as though I was the Christ on the cross, with his final breath and words.  The real world calls, as it has always done. I had to work amid my writing, for there are bills and rent to pay, family to support, vices to keep alive.  Now I am spent, always, always. I feel naked. Worse: I feel armorless in the mornings now, grasping for reality and finding just phone calls...

  “Good morning,” I texted, and received an almost instantaneous phone call as a response, which, after five rings, I answered. I was looking for my glasses, which, of course, one needed glasses for. “Good morning. You’re up early,” Bjørn said, sipping his coffee and looking distracted, somehow. I squinted my eyes in order to divine why, and, having caught my look, he explained, “I’m looking at your picture, the one where you have a black t-shirt on.” I was thoroughly confused. And when I am confused, I commit small mistakes, the most common being that I open my mouth. However, this time, I didn’t do that. This failure further added to the general confusion all around. The reason for not saying anything immediately was I didn’t know which remark to make first: the fact that I have almost twenty of those shirts hanging in my closet, or the fact that what he was staring at on his phone is actually, in a similar yet different way, right there, on his phone. That threw me in ...

  What I ended up asking Bjørn, however, was simply the complete opposite of a home: I asked about his oldest brother that he frequently calls an idiotic man-child: Didrik. I suppose I should actually use his name, the poor bastard. The question was an innocent accident, I will maintain. He texted me after having had a football game with his mates, full of testosterone from making the game-winning goal, and, perhaps not quite knowing what to do with the extra hormones rampaging to about six feet from his personal space, he turned the joy of victory into the despair of aggression. The end result of doing this was as masterful as a Katana-kaji forging a Nihonto, and equally, if not more, deadly. It was quite a sight. So intense was his aversion for everything that his brother is, and blatantly continues to be, that Bjørn, with the rare ability to sublimate a love for a game into a hatred for his brother, told me what Didrik told him once: that “football is the best metaphor for h...

  For no rhyme or reason, I had been listening to The Art of Manliness Podcast by Brett McKay, when a message from Bjørn, his first for the day, arrived. “I am returning to my lover, on Klovn og Tosk , in a month and a week. Have you had breakfast?”, never quite remembering that our time differential is seven hours and thus breakfast is actually lunchtime. “Okay. Say hi to her for me. Yes,” I replied. “One does not say hi to the Murmansk Fjord, much less to the sea.” “Oh. Pardon me.” I was smiling, though I wasn’t sure if he actually meant it. “ Du er tilgitt . (You are forgiven.) I will visit my younger half-brother in the afternoon, so I may not text for a while. It’s his birthday.” That while lasted for eight hours, by which time I ate again, completely read a book by Tessa Bailey (I did tell you I was tired of philosophers of various ilk, so I proceeded to entropize my brain with smut), worked for a bit, and had been asleep when my phone rang with its signature Cosmic Radio ...

  When I was younger and therefore more pretentious, I used to write poems about the sea a lot.   In all probability I may have abused the metaphoricity of all sea-related things - lighthouses, boats, sailors, waves, albatrosses - all standing for one emotional crisis or another. Most of the time I would, like a teenager who doesn't know his Shakespeare (I still don't), fill a card and send it to my boyfriend, having written about an obtuse poem featuring a lone sailor on the sea with stars and whatnot only to guide his way, filled with love and longing for something he knows he cannot have, or even successfully navigate (since the sailor is an idiot).   And most of the time I would get a baffled response along the lines of "If the sea represents me, and the sailor is you... Why is the sailor male?", or something like that.   Which of course begs a lot of questions, the first one being, “Why use the metaphor of sea-sailor when mountain-hiker or toaster-bread would ju...

The night comes with terrors, with shadow and darkness, and monsters untold. As such, we have created artificial lights to illumine our cities, to dispel the ancient fear of the world's ever and primal dark, to ward off being blind. The night holds secrets, cradling criminals and hookers, broken dreams, abandonment, and illicit trysts. It is the time of shady dealings, of gunshots in the dark, of stealing babes away from mothers, of pillaging villages and wartime desperation, and of utter hopelessness in prisons. The night is a time of silence, when we fully hear the great heartbeat of the city and the rumble of its arteries, the howls and songs of its citizens, the fatigue of the day slowly being replaced by the winding down of furious men and women whose hopes and resiliency are equaled only by the drudgery of the calendar going on and on in society running fast toward its own oblivion. The night is a time for forgiveness, when we finally look at our creator in the eyes and...

  The Lost Charge [1] by Max Kodiček She swept over me like the Ocean. Washing away the plastic memories.   Holding the cheat-codes to my heart, I confessed it all. Rolling around and clawing sheets, A wild animal trapped in pleasure. There were no buts until after, When I'd lost it all with a lion's roar, Until the tide had turned, And I was left shivering on the beach. A hopeless gambler stumbling home, Broken by the house, Empty again, As timid as a mouse.     -- Fin -- [1] https://joeambrose.substack.com/p/the-lost-charge

  It was the twelfth day of training when Max’s absolute dream and absolute nightmare came true: having been ordered through House Joint Resolution 169, the generals of the American military were asking soldiers from the Czechian reserve Army to engage in yet another proxy war against Hungary. At last, he thought, time to put on a goddamned battle helmet , finally, purely, simply becoming a soldier, through and through. (Or had he always been one…?) That morning, after dressing in his Army garb, he briskly and purposefully walked towards the rest of the similarly-clad soldiers. His people. His Captain, watching him, noticed that Max was holding his CZ-805 BREN assault rifle in the reverential way that he was never able to hold a pen. Finally - finally - like a bastard son who nonetheless effortlessly and perfectly play-acted to be what he was not the whole time, he had come home. His mind blessedly out of thought and his body ecstatically screaming with dopamine and testosteron...

  What she lacked in both talent and execution, she made up for by being frighteningly efficient, and therefore was quick but consistently flawed in whatever she does. She took fifteen-minute showers. She rinsed a dish under the tap with one hand while the other puts away a fork, so as to save water. She leapt through lines of transcribed sentences to find errors before the audio recording reaches them, so as to save time. She did not, therefore, waste her energy on useless things such as regret, nostalgia, breakfast, or just plain ol’ bitchin’ about the state of the world. It was, one had to admit, the perfection of the already mentioned path of least resistance. Now, however, Chris was afraid, and thus had to be careful. This one’s just as dangerous as you, albeit in the opposite direction . Max’s boredom in attained perfection is his fodder, as her frustration in consistent failure is hers. It was on Max’s eighth day of training when he finally noticed that he was on the bri...