An Unheard Cello By Geoffrey Miller

Restless unconscious lights muscle young scratchy underwater mists — submerged and stealing — lit by mad punch-dyed water, distractedly watching the creation of waste without apology.

A man, sunken in business cards, envelopes, and pie tin afterimage pinches black plastic as evidence inside a neon fluorescent supermarket. An unnaturally white bag — made in Pakistan — carries cigarettes, fish fillets, orange juice, fireworks, and fat shrimp to buy him moments.

Unscuffed, four-holed, labelless black shoes, evening, walking — louder on the station tiles, nervous near lockers and corners — fleeing over repainted crosswalks and lurking parking lots to an apartment that has sewn his fingers into the ownership of an onion-skinned script.

A wife, who used to be a woman, with the unblinking bondage of small fingerprints, deadlines, and formalities, and he listening officially to mouthfuls of taxes, Gucci, disease, lunches, and trains.

“Whiskey.”

The blending of a go-between is grabbing at objections, and he’s hesitating, outwitted by child fiber deadlines weaving wide-eyed eggs to be suddenly nervous about zoos to which his drunk tongue must beautifully commit.

Yui is smooth, hatching a look with chicken and food and milk — hitching a sapphire signal of a hundred wants while eating comfortably.

“Saturday.”

Yui smiles — shoulder, skirt, laying fingers to shaking and natural noises — blurring sleep into a blunted dream.

 

Massive structures

— Homeless —

Receipts for flowing songs discarded among nervous ocean freighters,

Wearing doorbells and mailboxes.

 

He is running water to steam, tiny oranges, and brown paper lunches with the sensitivity of a Rolex smeared by damp newspaper ink. “Two days . . . Tokyo,” said around the glittering profile of an umbrella, half out a taxi door through thoughts of future memories of money, airports, benches, office blocks, partnering among deadlines, balances, and burglary.

Yui, “Who cares.” She, among the dingy apartments, buying tall moods with telling wants and squirming and balancing shadows on her neck. She, a model with which to hitch the wrong thumb to his corpse — to be louder, lifting saliva and trembling and ringing and hazy — a girl without her shoes in the evening, smiling and moist.

Tokyo. Café. Waitress. Wants coffee . . . only.

An imprecise screen — last — claustrophobic partners guess among hundreds of takes, watching a wooden model in ruins, split and shut-up.

© 2015 Geoffrey Miller

Geoffrey Miller’s most recent fiction can be found in Crack The Spine, Revolver, Ginosko Literary Journal, Pank, and The Journal of Micro Literature. Visually check out Paper Tape Magazine and Weave Magazine or see ‘Paris’ on the June 2014 cover of Spittoon.

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