Heather

by Bryan D. Price

Wryon A/Unsplash

there is something brutal about the word never like executioner or hygiene or vitiate

if you’re not careful never becomes like a future a psychic is afraid to tell you about my mother went to a place called Summerlin near Las Vegas and had her palm read by a man who sold abalone on the side she told me he said I’d meet an aspiring cartoonist named Heather at a hamburger stand in West Hollywood the day I met her I was visually impaired and could not operate a motor vehicle she mixed grain alcohol into her citrus-flavored soda and smoked the kind of cigarettes you’d get in a Macau casino she said violence is followed by contrition and contrition by forgiveness a cycle that deteriorates into a valley of melancholy the kind that wastes bodies away I pictured a cow in a pink field rubbing itself away on a rock after that I can’t remember what we talked about because memory is so discursive follows its own proprietary push or trajectory a path through certain genetic or bodily configurations where some pleasure receptors got blocked or otherwise gummed up I’ve traced it back to the 1850s in my own fucked up family one has to remain vigilant against such decay

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Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Santa Monica Review, Diagram, Mississippi Review, Boulevard, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.