Hi all,

I am wondering if Fex & Coo and Deathling Crown Lottery have stimulated any fictive

responses in you, whether in dreams or otherwise? If so, I invite you to send anything

of this nature to me and I will post. Do not hesitate!

 

Russ

TULLY’S IS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS

 

First there was one,

but the one said, let there be two.

Then the two imagined others

and a curious thing happened.

The others started reimagining the two.

And then all hell broke loose.

There were books and banks

and rings and things.

There were birds of the night

and birds that could pluck a fish

swimming fast and alone in its murky canyon.

There were dreams and visions

and people erased with the touch of a key.

One minute they were here and then they were not,

only to reappear to ask, ‘Where did I go?’

There was confusion and mystery,

There was then and there was now,

the two sliding over each other

as easily as water in a glass.

There was the incandescent smell of flowers,

of jasmine and heather,

and a fox named Agatha.

The audience, caught in the vortex

of time and impaled on its unmoored imagination,

could bear no more and promptly fainted.

 

Everyone now had a time problem

and did not know when they were to be

where they were supposed to be.

Everyone now worried about tomorrow,

since no one was sure if being time-stopped
would matter to tomorrow if tomorrow never came.

But they did not worry about dreams and bones

and the future since the future could be changed,

unlike tomorrow which was just an invention of the mind.

Just an silly trick to keep us from side-stepping

the whole slavish obsession with what comes next.

But what comes next did not matter

because no one knew what could possibly come next.

All these birds and flowers

and troupes of players

armed with kisses and bullets,

razor tongues and opaque ears,

flew from the moment

towards the past or the future

and upon arriving there

did not not know where they were.

They only thing they actually knew

was that none of the innocent were injured

and everyone else won the lottery

but could not collect until on their deathbed.

Then Tully’s announced it was, sadly, going out of business.

The audience fainted once again

and for the last time.