Christopher Shannon

the difference between a cigarette holder and cigarette case, the pleasure of a lorgnette over spectacles, of a fortnight over two weeks, of a spiral over graduated stairs, of the frisson of crying like pouty boys, and of the way to walk a lobster on a leash: drag it, its exoskeleton rapping on the cobbles through the rabble of Montparnasse, as if lugging luggage. We did what could not gain us a week of rent or even a plate of fish, yet we managed to eat sickening amounts, to hate on our patroness, the Princess de Polignac, though, and I am sorry, she had bought us wine. Once, in the chamber before an evening concert, I hid a sack of bees in the white baby grand, and when ball-gowned Polignac raised the leaf they swarmed through the strings to the chandelier and the Princess saw a living sun and felt a little less dreary and a little less proud of being bored.

dine on disco balls and starfish, our jowls crashing like cymbals, while my baby brother takes out his eight-ball left eye and squints his right to line up his shot on the world’s smallest pool table. Mother has a camera for a head; it flashes uncontrollably though she claims to have run out of film a hundred years ago, when father’s penis, an unstoppable spigot, became a garden sprinkler, contained by adult diapers, changed hourly, and hourly, my sister— shuffling out of her hiding place in the cuckoo clock, her hair a mess of paper clips, a Raggedy Ann doll in her arms—sighs to pass the time. Water seeps through the ceiling, because upstairs the bathtub overflows, for Grandma has forgotten the bath she’s drawn, and on the stove the gas is high, the flames are heating up a pudding over which my opa whispers: boil, boil, loyal rubble, follow me to the end of my life.

I really think its getting to be that time,