Eight
Lying in bed at night, I think about the things I never want to hear again. I never want to hear one of IDIOT FRIEND’s bullshit excuses for why he hasn’t done work assigned to him (he once told me he hadn’t take pictures I required for a pitch deck because he couldn’t hold the camera straight due to our thirty-second earthquake), any of his mindless (and unsubstantiated) attacks, or any of his remorseful but shitty, provisional apologies. Sometimes, you offer perfunctory acceptance in return because it’s just too much effort to extract yourself from a mire of shit, stupidity, and idiocy. That’s why so many people persevere with terrible…
Three
It’s not my friend’s voice I hear. It’s male – nasal, but sharp, like an electrical current that has been shaped into language, but also reverberating in a filter to produce a tight echo. And low. It might be coming from my left shoulder, but directed into my ear, worming into my head, startling me not just because they’re words in the middle of the night, but because they grate. I can’t process this the way I would other words. They have a serrated quality that saws through my mind. There are so many things the voice sounds like, so many things it can be, but none of these descriptions…