Strange Breezes

A storm at night. I walk into my back yard to feel the wind. It is enormous; clouds speed by overhead, morphing rapidly. There is a large screen erected around the yard and overhead, protecting me from debris.

I muse about the symbolic meaning of the storm, the wind representing the paternal energy fundamental to every family. A father's fierce egotism that must be appeased.

A large poster with pictures of young girls and old women stapled to it hovers by. Somebody has fashioned it with the intention of setting it on the wind. It catches in a trellis and I am excited to retrieve it. Kanye West, who has a ladder, claims it before I can. As I am complaining, he turns into M.I.A.

I am recounting the story to my brother, but I embellish it by claiming the poster was sent from "Sao Paolo, Venezuela."

•

I am in an apartment, alone, about sixty stories above Central Park. There is nobody anywhere and everything glows with sickly, ochre light. I write letters to distant friends while watching birds of prey hunt outside. I look down and see a crowd below a nearby building, catching objects someone is throwing down to them. I learn by reading a mysteriously obtained invitation card that an orchestral musician is committing suicide after tossing his belongings out of his window. I am filled with melancholy, and question the legality of printing invitations to a suicide.

•

I am treading water in a deep swimming pool, one I know to be popular for punk rock concerts. Attendants would dive to the bottom and have subaquatic mosh pits while bands also played underwater.

•

I am an assassin. Nathan Statham has just been injected with a hundred doses of the Chinese poison. He is taken to a doctor's house, where they are preparing to conduct brain surgery in the living room. They are preparing to saw the top of his skull off when I rush out of the house. On the driveway I fall to my knees, weeping, lamenting in Spanish at the top of my lungs the frailties of mortality.