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Joseph Gorodnitskiy
Shelf Life
Mom buried the dryer in the yard. It was a big, faceless white one, and draining enormous amounts of electricity. In the aisle of the PC Richard & Son that she'd picked it from there was a sleek, black, better dryer right next to it. This sleeker, better dryer had a see-through door and aquatic arrows pointing out to you all the little options, but she settled on the cheaper faceless one because it was sadder.
Fish
Fish is so thirsty. Fish writes down: color is unstable, air is metal; then Fish falls into himself: when he ran right through a splash pad, when he caught up to the darkest firefly, when he stared at the eclipse, believing himself blind, thinking the worst thing in the world had happened to him.
A Fat Memory of a Falling Tree
She sculpted a paper airplane from my notebook and threw it at the chalk drawing of the rain forest. Tropical, high rainfall. Her hands on her thighs, her hands and her hands. “I’m gonna go to lunch now, come.” Acorns bursting, stuttering as they grow, left-leaning. Speak now and use your face. You have a knowing. “Anyway,” she said in a singsong. “You will be missed, sincerely, the person who has been sufficiently insistent on eating with you.”
When she left, I felt safer but sadder. I thought that if I had to pick between never feeling sad or nervous again I’d pick never feeling sad again. I got hot and imagined a fat tree yawning as it tipped over even though I didn’t want it to do that and I thought about how sometimes my head felt like it was made of autumnal wood and how I imagined it tipping off my shoulders and making forest sounds when it turned to white skull dust, the memory of the first time she put her hand on my leg sketched inside brain on dirty school tile. Ms. Dugan came in for her 1:30 class and said something that my ears forgot. “Why are you sitting in the dark?” forcing her face to be serious. “You don’t have to suffer.” And suddenly I started crying and according to the memory, I didn’t stop.
Joseph Gorodnitskiy is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in Bending Genres, Maudlin House and Expat Press.
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