by Cee Martinez
I. Ice
He lay on the ground as blood frothed his lips. Screams and gunshots married the sound of glass breaking into dust. It was a sound like ice.
He thought of soft ice, the kind that came in little crunchy pellets.
He remembered guzzling cold beer, and thought of cigarettes and sex.
He imagined the girl he married and her cool hands on his face.
II. Aftermath
I know the guy who did the autopsy. I just get out a lot, don’t know how I meet these people.
Anyway, he said the bartender must have been rolling around and swallowing glass. They said the glass was between his teeth and everything! Even if he did survive the the bullets all the glass had ripped his esophagus anyway! It just isn’t right you know?
III. Taped to the Gravestone
I had a dream you were a wisp—but I held you, and the wisp was glass, but then I ate you, and the wisp was candy—and then I woke up and the pain in my belly told me the wisp was real.
It isn’t and never was, which means I am awake with the pains in my belly of glass that never is and never was, with pain that was never meant to exist but can’t be wished away. Just wait and the wisp is gone, just wait, and the glass turns to powder, and powder is like candy and candy dissolves away, and candy always leaves behind sweet . . . doesn’t it?
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