In the Mirage
ISSUE #310
I feel so hot. Hasn't it been so hot, sometimes? There is a heat outside that makes me feel—bad. The heat subsides, the heat returns. The heat returns, the heat returns. And when it returns? The heat—it, the heat. It the heat—goes so over the line.
When I was younger, with writing, I hated rhetorical questions. "It's our job to find the answer!" "We leave the prompt unspoken!" This, as a prick, was responsibility to me. You strive to say what your self would read; you respect the soul's mortal time and intellect.
I see that all as error now. In this, the writer (which is every thinking thing) is bullied into saying nothing. In truth, the outlaw (might be every thinking thing) is our only hope. Sorry—turns out each em dash I ever punched just fed an automated mirror.
Almost only the incorrect we can know are no longer generative? At least—the rules are truly dead; long live our rules.
About a month before I started cramming The Odyssey, I was halfway through a pocket-sized Macmillan Collector’s Edition of The Maltese Falcon. It was my first time reading it. I’ve actually never even seen it. But! I did study Hammett in a paperback class in college—he was the genesis of hard-boiled crime fiction, which was called noir when adapted to screen. His prose could be sharp as Hemingway’s, at his best.