Fiction of the Day
Concerning the Future of Souls
By Joy Williams
Each birth is not the creation of a soul but the completion of the transmigration from one body to another. There is no such thing as a new soul.
Each birth is not the creation of a soul but the completion of the transmigration from one body to another. There is no such thing as a new soul.
Cora was mad. Someone had stolen her yellowish underpants.
It’s true, I open the door, I see them ... they create order . . . order! ... they clear the landing ... and our room ... and the toilet ... everybody out, let’s go! ... down the stairs! nobody left on our floor ... have they come to arrest me ? ... that’s my first idea ...
Every morning when she woke up, she saw the flame and felt the fire—curling around her lashes, creeping up her thighs, blossoming flowers of pink upon her flesh. Clutching stiff lace against her dangling breasts, pressing her heels into the bedpost, she would scream, her singed cheek wrinkling into itself.
The moon is out and full. The sky is that near blue of bright clear nights, so bright that one can see only a few of the brightest stars. On the horizon the sharp, barren mountains, then the desert, like a sea.
The city is empty. Nico is asleep. She is bound by twisted sheets, by her long hair, by a naked arm which falls from beneath her pillow. She lies still, she does not even breathe.
ACH THE LAST TO BE FIRST AND VICE VERSA: one beat more, one less,.., the ticking (more or less regular but uneven metronomic sequences) rebounds on the pain at different pitches.
The slabs of marble were stacked in huge, sturdy heaps extending over nearly the entire deck of the ship and mounting toward the stern. A number of very wide pieces formed rough bases for these heaps.
There is much to say about soap. Precisely every thing that it tells about itself until the complete disappearance, the exhaustion of the subject. This is just the object suited to me.
Our world is the Mesopotamian Plain. We have one city, called the City, which is located almost exactly in the center of the plain. Half of us live in the City, the other half on farms in the countryside. As far as we know, we natives of the plain are the only humans on the face of the earth.
There is much to say about soap. Precisely every thing that it tells about itself until the complete disappearance, the exhaustion of the subject. This is just the object suited to me.