Sebastian Malloy – Page 2

Paranormal Tinglies

The clock on my phone reads 1:40am, and I finally give up on trying to sleep and crawl out of bed. I slip into the walk-in closet and get dressed by the glow from my phone before heading downstairs for coffee and breakfast. My mood can not in the slightest...

No Take Backs

Rivi is crumpling junk mail newspaper fliers into balls and packing them around the drinking glasses in the box on the counter. “I still find it impossible to believe you guys are moving,” she says. “We’ve been talking about it for years,” I tell her. “You should have been listening,...

So Irritating

We are hiding in the blanket fort that Rivi has built in her living room, a semi-permanent and elaborate construction, stretching from chair to chair and bookshelf to bookshelf, nestled in the corner near the door to her bedroom. Christmas lights dangle from binder clips at the top of the...

Twenty Year Storm

The rain is pouring outside, Biblical and a little unsettling. It pounds against the window of Viola’s attic, and the window rattles in its frame against the wind that whips down from the atmospheric river currently pummeling the west coast. “Well,” Viola says. “Guess we aren’t going out on the...

Funereal Hillbillies

We are in the California Central Valley, about a half an hour north of Sacramento, and we are tired of driving. It’s farmland here mostly, trees and low plants that I can’t identify without vegetables or fruit growing on them, and fenced off grazing land with cattle wandering about. It’s...

Alain Delon and la Dépression Française

It’s snowing as Rivi and I walk along the path beside the creek. She has been staying with us for a week, and has spent most of the time in the guest room with the door shut. Hibernating, she calls it. Hiding, I tell her. Either way, I’m glad that...

Hannah plays Iggy Pop through the speakers of her iPhone as we walk down the wooded path, which leads to an overlook by the Golden Gate Bridge. The wheels of traffic buzz like honeybees on the pavement from just out of sight. I glance over at her as we walk,...

“I hate that it doesn’t snow here,” Rivi says from the kitchen. “It’s a drought,” I say, laying on the chaise in the living room. “It doesn’t snow anywhere anymore.” It is ungodly early, somewhere around seven in the morning, and I haven’t slept all night. Rivi had appeared on...

Black headphones against a dark background

“I’m setting fire to my Twitter,” Viola says. “It’s too much of a fucking mess. That whole place is imploding so hard that it’s going to suck into itself and black hole the entire thing into another dimension.” We are sitting on the roof of her house, just outside her attic window, in a place most people would consider dangerous. We are not most people. It’s cold out, and gray, and an icy wind is blowing, but there is still a plague going on, even if most of the world is pretending that there isn’t. Up here, we can take…

Antediluvian Banker’s Boxes

“I used to write poetry,” Viola tells me. “A million years ago, before I got old and fossilized.” “You aren’t old,” I say. “You’re just a baby.” “I’m the same age as you, Bastian. We are antediluvian.” We are in the back yard of her house, seated in wrought iron chairs around the matching iron table. We are not masked in this time of plague, which is fine. The both of us are vaccinated, and we do not go anywhere, do anything. This is the world now. We make do as best we can. “I have a banker’s box in…

Rocket Man

Plans In the Fading Light

“Sit on the end of the bed,” I say. “Hands in your lap.” Tina does as I ask, putting her hands together, letting them fall slightly into the space between her thighs. She is wearing an old cardigan, a whisper of blue still clinging to the thin fabric. It’s open in the front, revealing to my eye, but I know that when I take the photo, the curves beneath will be lost in the shadows painted on her by the fading evening light. “Don’t move,” I say. I go to her, and with the tip of my finger, I move…

The Bones in Her Throat

The rain falls on me, heavy at first, then lighter, then heavier again. I am soaked to the skin, and I am hoping that the backpack I’m wearing is waterproof. I’m afraid to open it to check, and so I leave it on and just keep walking. The further I go along the street, the fewer people I see, the fewer parked cars, the fewer buildings. Soon the sidewalk runs out as well, replaced with a grassy shoulder along the road, and there is nothing to either side of me except fields speckled with the occasional group of oaks, and…

A Chess Game of Cards

I am meeting Suzi at the Palace of Fine Arts, beneath the giant dome on the edge of the pond. The crowd is much larger than I’d been expecting, a thick herd of people milling about, blocking my way, nearly tripping over one another as they walk the grounds. I’d forgotten it is Memorial Day weekend, which explains why I’d had to park in Timbuktu and walk a million miles to get here. My phone buzzes, and I see that it’s Suzi calling me. “Hello,” I say, answering it. “Hi,” she says. “I’m here. I have no idea where…

The Welcomed Rising Tide

“New shoes,” Tina says, turning her feet this way and that, the cherry red leather glowing in the sunlight coming through her bedroom window. “Very red,” I say. I am in her bed, the sheet gathered around my waist. “Like how much more red can they be?” “The answer is none,” she says, putting a twist on the obligatory Spinal Tap joke. “None more red.” “Are you going to put any other clothes on? Or just go out in nothing but shoes?” “It’s San Francisco,” she says. “Rules don’t apply here.” I’ve seen Tina undressed many times before in our…

The Belly of the Storm

It isn’t raining outside Sullivan’s shop, but it looks as though it had been until only a few moments before. The blacktop dimly reflects the light which fell through the heavy dark clouds above, and the narrow sidewalk is layered in a thin sheet of water which still seems to ripple from the drops which had been crashing against it. Great trees line the road, tall and black against the gray sky, and their leaves hang heavy with moisture. Sullivan’s shop is the only building I can see on the street. Everything else in either direction is only trees, stretching…