Howie Good

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

It was a good thing you weren’t there on the railway platform. The guard had ordered the prisoner to choose who should be shot, his young wife or his baby. A kind person spread her coat on top of the hole in the ground when it started raining. There are things no one should have to see – from the fumbling attempts of an injured bird at flight to children with swollen bellies and matchstick arms. I got home around dark. My elderly mother was in the kitchen hacking at a ham with a cleaver. Just one time I would like macaroni and cheese. I haven’t had it in years.

A Parable

Do cows get excited? Their knees don’t look like they could handle all that running and jumping around. Anyway, I’m not going to let it ruin my good time. My mother was afraid to drive on highways, a phobia I don’t share, but many apparently do. I’m reminded of an old Russian parable about the pilot of an American spy plane who was supposed to bite down on a cyanide capsule if captured and didn’t. It’s a still night. The moon is out. A crowd of onlookers gaze at his body hanging from a construction crane with a sack covering his head.

A Heart-Shaped Hole

Cawing crows returned disconsolate to the ruined woods as if drawn there by a perverse but irresistible force. Love Like Jesus, a peeling highway billboard said. Everything normal that came before had been swept away. Imagine your house was now destroyed and black. Once in a while something would pop up. Usually a person could tell what it was, the last time maybe a little too much – one child-size shoe lying on its side at the edge of a mass grave.

Three Places to Visit

1

Musk said if I got the cash together, he would take me and my wife on his flying saucer to a planet that was made entirely of drugs. At first I wasn’t sure. But then I was like, “OK, why not?” Our own planet is fucked. You can smell it – a stench like dead flower water in a vase.

2

The people eat the same lunch every day. They believe the force of laughter can dislocate jaws and make hernias protrude. Everything else has been declared safe for visitors and included on official tours.

3

It’s the village where the kill switch originated. Something is always transforming into something else – friendship into love, words into a book, a bird into a song. I am going to keep on throwing myself into the sea until I get there.

The Ladies of Border Control

Given the state of not only the world, but also my nerves, I should have practiced in front of the mirror. I was stupid to ever think I wouldn’t be examined by the ladies of border control. They searched my carry-all and found a reproduction of Duchamp’s pipe. They sniffed the bowl, squinted suspiciously at the teeth-scarred mouthpiece. Next they took apart my hat and shoes and flipped through the photos on my phone, laughing at the selfies I’d snapped when I hadn’t fully recovered yet from a rifle butt to the face. Brothers and sisters, it’s always safest to assume the monsters are everywhere.