8-Bit Blue

I’m playing a game that is about a lonely town full of lonely people. Some of them are farmers, some of them are failed artists. At one point I was given a cow and a chicken and a mouse. A single log to start a gentle fire. But I’m still not in love. The seasons pass very quickly. Summer into autumn into winter into spring into dream. But the deep, welling ache still sits there. 8-bit blue. Dulcet tones of rainy evening monotony. The hour in the forest where I could’ve said how I felt, years ago. Chores and longing tomorrow. The dog dressed as Ichabod Crane. A project that will never be finished, because it is designed that way. Oh? Of course! Half of life is lived elsewhere. But we only find out which half after the fact.

Notes in My Fingers

I wrote a beautiful song the other day while fiddling on the guitar. It sounded perfect. Like something divine had put the words on my tongue, the notes in my fingers. But I seemed to have lost it. I can’t remember anything about the song, except that it was perfect and beautiful. The melody is lost to memory. You would’ve cried though. The evening would’ve felt just right, like a long, velvet curtain being dropped on the sunset of your life. But what am I even fucking saying? Gobbledygook! Bleghk! I can’t even play guitar! Never have. Will probably never learn. I don’t have imagination—I just have a cold, clarifying ache that invents what it wants.

Bare

She was taking her shoe off. Earlier, as in days before, she had said, “I’m not going to do anything.” She wanted him to know this. But now she’s taking her shoe off. She’s doing it slowly. She’s going to take her other shoe off after that. That’s understood. Her feet will be bare. Or at least one will. Soon it will be Christmas, when people reveal themselves. They open boxes. Light candles. If they dream, they dream of long, sultry nonsense. The kind that you wake from in a sweat and all abuzz. Someone once took their shoes off for you. You were special. All of the world took place in Pennsylvania. Which was just a word among many that didn’t appear in Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.





Shane Kowalski lives in Pennsylvania. His work has been published in Harper’s, Conjunctions, EPOCH, Fence, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. He’s the author of Small Moods and Are People Out There (both published by Future Tense Books).

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