violence and logic

by David Luntz

When he was eight, a seer told him the exact day, hour, minute, and second of his death. Before he goes to sleep, he counts down the breaths he’s got left. Sometimes he dreams he’s making a new map of Europe on an empty beach from stranded jellyfish tentacles. He never gets stung. He dons a Spartan face mask. He wants to go back to where thinking began, to know the world through Milesian logic. Sometimes a school bus drives over his map. Its yellow paint job speaks good mustard, a spicy Dijon his grandmother liked. The driver drinks from a bottle of tequila. The driver is his father. The tequila plays jazz. After he wakes up, he smells sweat stains from the moonlight he peeled off his bedroom windows when he was sleepwalking. Once at a museum, he saw a purple sash a famous pasha’s eunuch used to strangle the pasha’s new-born nephews. He wondered how many breaths those infants got before they didn’t. He thought, “Violence and logic whisper to each other behind our backs.” In the next gallery, he saw an exhibit of old maps of Europe made up of mandrake roots, eyeless beasts, and empty pockets of terrae nullius and terra incognita. They twitched. A sudden burning across his chest surprised him.

Photo of David Luntz

BIO: David Luntz’s work is forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, Hobart Pulp, Farewell Transmission, trampset, scaffold, ergot., X-R-A-Y Lit, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david