By morning, another white kitten was dead. That left two white ones, and Lydia, who slept on his chest. As usual when he came back from Houston he hadn’t slept but lain sweating on his bare mattress in a kind of waking trance: this time, a procession of corpses, human and otherwise, roasting in cold orange fire, crucified in X’es on metal frames, a vision that had no beginning and no end but seemed the revelation of a world truer than the one in which he lived. He looked outside at the shadow world, of trees and cars and his neighbors walking past, horrifying in its certainty, and saw that the right front tire of his car was flat. He remembered driving on it, then he didn’t, then he did. It was a mistake, he thought, that he was still alive.
“Little Deaths,” Epoch, Volume 67, Number 2 (Spring 2018)
