Serial Library passage April 27

Out there, at the edge of the universe, slipping past us in units as ungainly as time itself, the great silver ship, Criterion, rouses the hearts of those who glimpse her through the round telescopic holes they jab into the cosmos.

Serial Library passage Apr. 22

When I listen to a story, I am listening for the decisions you men are making, Pillow told the men. She was surrounded by a circle of men who were love sick over her. They didn’t know that Pillow loved Cloud. There were fortunes to be told. Pillow stood at a certain angle and the men were well aware of their good fortune. The light behind Pillow made her soul seem diaphanous. The men were dabblers. They worked in the night and then dabbled all day. They were water cooler lackeys. They lacked what real men needed, which was to understand the ways of a woman. Pillow was a woman, and they were looking for clues. But they were looking at the wrong woman. Pillow didn’t mind. She remained where she was, silent, like a pillar of soft malleable soapstone in the midst of a circle of men she could turn to granite with a simple shift of her shoulder. She understood that, whatever else she did with the days remaining in her life, for this day, at least, she was a deeply diaphanous moment in the fabric of time.

Serial library passage Apr. 13

The woman, whose hair was a net of musical notes, made a noise like a word that has no meaning. At the end of the day, the woman had gathered up a brief series of noises that together sounded a poem, a haiku, only more like water, and shorter. It took her all day and then she fell upon herself like a ravaged beast and twisted in her bed sheets like a bird rolling upon the silvery surface of the air above a waterfall. The woman slept now like dreaming a stave of counterpoint components that has no beginning or end, complementary components that exist merely to allow for the arrival of something newer, something more unexpected than what had ever come before.

Serial Library passage Apr. 12

The woman whose hair was the next in the series of poems did the dirty deed. The man felt the woman inside him like being stabbed in the heart. He died at the end of each of the woman’s poems. The poems came like icicles raining from the place inside the woman that was raw and open, a wounded rabbit blearing its blood along the surface of the woman’s skin, howling deep within the woman’s tremulous skin.

We are the masters of our own destiny, said the magistrate. We are the light at the edge of the world. We are the prongs on the forks in the cupboard of the secret house our tiniest wishes live in. We are twice the size of the place we thought we were going in the days before we got to where we have finally found ourselves going to today.

Alice looked out the window. There was a guy with a knapsack in the rain. A small black dog ran along the sidewalk. A kid sat on his dad’s lap inside the café watching the guitar player. Alice went in the washroom. There was a gold dog with the black dog when she came back out and sat at her table by the window. The two dogs had a piece of rubber they were taking turns killing. Normally, Alice didn’t sanction killing. But dogs kill rubber things. Alice understood this. This seemed like the normal course of affairs to Alice. It seemed okay. She felt something inside her float out of her, leaving her empty of anything. Whatever it was that floated out of her, it was all she had. She set her elbows on the table and put her chin in her hands. She felt the freedom of being empty, the unutterably painful freedom of having nothing left.