Malikmata

“[H]e only dreamt of her in pieces: a shoulder; a huge, lustrous eye floating over a bed of flowers; the shaft of her thighs like some shattered bit of statuary. It as if [absence] had left her decimated in so many hopelessly disparate, ephemeral sections. Even her whispers […] reached [him] in a succession of scattered fragments of what might have been some promissory message, reached him like spume bursting over the walls of some invisible breakwater. Reached him, too, like the rare, scarely legible passages of an otherwise obliterated antique text. Immersed in such a state, he cherished every syllable. Tried to recall each and every broken utterance upon awakening. Would even scribble whatever he remembered on a notepad he kept alongside his bed for that very purpose. Of all her utterances, though, the one which repeated most often was ‘why.’ A 'why’ without object, without subject: a great, gaping, irrecusable 'why.’”

“A rose pinned to my shirt like a throbbing ear, an ear listening to the wreckage scraping at the bottom of your words.”

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”

“To have a feeling for landscape, you have to lose your feeling of place.”