Time Accelerator Wish (by David Novak)

Sure.

Sometimes she likes to smoke.

And sure, she knows that’s what killed her mother.

But she doesn’t know why people keep telling her she has a death wish. How can she wish for something she knows is already going to happen. To wish for the inevitable? That seems silly. Like a waste of a perfectly good wish.

So, instead, she thinks of it as a time-accelerator wish. That every puff of smoke will nudge the clock forward, and give reluctant seconds a push in the right direction.

She doesn’t have a death wish. Really. She just hates to wait.

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Letter

Dear Father, 

You ask what will I do with my life? Oh man. I dunno. I want to rid Australia of tall poppy syndrome. I want to apply psych research to creating a more just society through campaigns and clever storytelling. I want to revolutionize our broken education system. I want to smack sense into our politics. I want to move to Australia at age 35 and be fulfilled with the work I do there, while swimming in the ocean every day too. 

I want it all. And yet, I could die or get paralyzed at any instant. 

Life’s insane!

Next Steps

My husband died, she said, and the next day I danced the Tango.

She looked at me with flat, frank eyes.

Tango is rigid yet passionate, she explained. Your mind switches off and your body switches on. Dancers leave their baggage at the door and express the inexpressible through movement.

Two years of cancer. Two years of watching helplessly.  Two years contemplating death and aloneness. 

I was in another room when he died. I felt his soul kiss me on its way up.

Words are clean. But feelings are messy, life is messy, and death is messy.

So I dance.

 

Recipe

Prepare shrimp/cornflour mix in plastic container.  Place container on stove to ease transfer of shrimp into pan.  Turn on stove burner under pan.  Chop up garnish.  Look back and realize that you accidentally turned on the fucking burner under the fucking plastic container.  Inhale cascading polymer fumes in panicked breaths whilst joking awkwardly about the situation to nearby houseguests.  Turn on extractor fan and mentally compare vortex of pale smoke to an inverted UFO beam, thinking about how the extraterrestrials inside might even resemble these crustaceans now sublimating in your stovetop Chernobyl diorama.  Exit hallucination, guzzle therapeutic bourbon and cry.

BART

I was taking photos on the BART platform today. A BART employee walked over to me, and asked what I was taking photos for.

I said I was working on an art project.

He asked if I’d been in contact with the BART media office.

I said no.

He said I needed to stop taking photos.

I said I thought it was a free country.

He said that his manager upstairs saw me and said I needed to stop. “It’s a safety issue.”

I said, oh, that’s interesting, you guys have cameras?

He said he didn’t want to debate anymore.