Mystique, the rule of terror... a tale of great inflation. The asphalt road darkens without a light. There is no glare
from oncoming traffic on a dangerous bend, a long straight : just a thin moon in wild, cavernous cloud...
a demonstration of storm. The taut wires are down, our bridge ahead uncertain. Whitecaps motion to the shore.
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Vilnian Breakfast, After The Coup
In the forest, Soviet tank squadrons charged around in circles, crushing the pine, their engine plumes darker than ever. They had shelled the city TV station.
Most of their gnarled-leather, Baltic stooges had left, moved on to another camp. A few knelt, cleaning the kitchen microphones run to the hungry, fuggy dens of power,
the central heating at a temperature in mid-summer, high enough for the Arctic- and wheezing to a civic thermostat. The restaurant was preparing raw breakfast
for the few. Reserved... for men with hard currency, proper contacts. On every venetian blind drawn down tight, a heavy coating of dust by convenient grime on the street window
a summer sun could barely irradiate. On the next-door table lay a clean revolver from the black leather holster of a guard eating a breakfast pf sour cabbage
and jaded onions in the ochre restaurant: he kept on angering the beady flies, and the back of his vest grew dark with sweat. A swing door closed, another opened quickly.
Out in a Party suburb, russet bulldozers puffed to dig over an enviable hill, gouge a row of immaculate villas for those on the right side of a coup.
Within a month, the man I was awaiting lay dead, a perfect bullet though the brain.
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The Staring Horde
The dry straw was golden in the hut. A low music off the steppe, or tundra:
and a sudden obliteration like snow in August of the wild, mountain rose.
You imagined fates of the many captured, and now silent
hearing winter.
============================== First published in Breakfast For Caliban (The Rockingham Press 1996)
