England
Jonjon Belmont had the hint of a moustache, the hint of a personality. He always lay close to the edge of our bed, the copious Snake-Bites we consumed in the Eastbourne pub on the summer solstice had created an unreality so real I could feel scales instead of skin. Drunk and feeling touristy, we headed for the infamous suicide cliffs of Beachy Head. We got lost in the dark. We were tired. We had a doze.
Annoyed at the snoring Jonjon, I pushed him off the bed. When I woke up at dawn the air was dense with sea-salt spray. Down at the base of the Beachy Head cliffs a group of people had formed a perfect circle around an exclamation mark.
Estonia
Arvi swam in 999 of his country’s 1400 lakes and he was only 36. In his travels he’d had been attacked by a grey wolf, a lynx, a brown bear, a red fox, a wild boar and a moose.
“We will share number one thousand, yes?”
“Yes, of course, my pleasure,” I said.
We touched tongues, ate cheese and bread.
The snow cover was atypical for April. Our gloved hands held each other tight until he slipped on a bridge crossing the Emajogi River and I let him go. He drowned and was flushed out into Lake Peipus.
Louisiana
Crossing Lake Pontchartrain on the causeway, Peter is telling me I’m surplus, not in a good way like a government surplus but in a bad way, like too many cooks in the kitchen. We are melted by humidity in New Orleans. The bourbon’s watered down and the music is recalibrated to vanilla for tourist tastes.
The bus takes me from Audubon Park to Tulane University where Peter’s studying. He waves me off one more time in a taxi saying head for his apartment. The driver has the directions.
I end up in Lafayette Cemetery, and I reckon the message is sinking in like those headstones into the soggy boggy-wash.
Keith Nunes has had poetry, fiction, haiku and visuals published around the globe. He creates ethereal manifestations as a way of communicating with the outside world. Nunes writes when the light pings and the only voices to be heard are in his head. He sleeps with Kurt Vonnegut’s hopes, Cole Swenson’s descriptions, Lydia Davis’s prose, Denis Johnson’s heroines, Larry Eigner’s old wheelchair and so on. He plans to evolve into a particle. He is currently related to Pessoa.