three six five ;

I awoke from chasing tigers to chasing the cold in spaces beneath my pillows, edges of the bed. I kicked off the sheets, my face covered with sweat, sought solace by pressing it against the window. Outside, it is raining. From the corner of my eyes, raindrops against glass looked like a thousand butterflies beating their wings to a rest. I breathe until my head is surrounded with haze, and out of fancy I squeeze my face harder on the surface to see my face at sideways glance, painted with the beyond window view, my own breath as foggy backdrop. But there is no world outside the windows; at least none I knew of. No-World is white and gray. The rain sounds like a louder silence; the calendar stuck on March of last year. Shoes lay with notebooks, strewn across the floor, indifferent to the cold; discarded clothes lay as I left them, keeping the joints of chairs warm. Had I chosen to, I would have lain still and have become included in the room’s secret conference. Had I chosen to, I would have lain still and not gone out to the empty hall, the empty rooms, to see that I am left out of this conversation, uninvited to this grand event. The wall clock is frozen at six; I look under the blankets, pillows, bed for my phone for hopes of telling time but as the search ends in vain, outside, the rain could only fall harder and I, in surrender, could only lie still.

Katrina Del Rosario

April 23. Fell asleep to Bombay Bicycle Club’s Album, flaw. The following dream look and felt like a supernatural version of “Winter’s bone”, spliced with Spike Jonze’s”Where the wild things are.” 

Strange dream. There were was this couple, visiting another couple in a shack in the woods. They’d been having dinner and it was time to go home, and at the door, the visiting couple had  reservations about going home seeing as it was getting dark and so they kept stalling, while the owners of the home insisted that there was nothing to be scared of in the wood and that it was completely safe to travel by moonlight. The woman believed there was some sort of force out in the wood that threatened to kill them. Skip to the morning, we see the man on a university campus. He was joining a group forming outside the library. There was a man with a twig sword (and by sword, I mean, a long one formed by little twigs all magnetized to each other in a loose jointed manner in a zigzag pattern supported by nothing) and had one antennae, similar to that of a  moth, protruding outward from his forehead, longer than his neck. He had a salt and pepper beard, and was surly and angry like a professor would be in a class, He was giving a impassioned, matter of fact speech about the ideology which he followed, which proved to be correct one hundred percent of the time when believed in completely, which, according to him, entailed that they forget about normal logic because this was the new way. the man of the shack was disheveled and clearly something happened to him during the night, but I do not know what.

Josel Nicolas

When he received their letter, he was ecstatic.

The finest Arts School in the city! And they want an interview! The whole week preceding his interview, he worked hard on his paintings, he practiced what he was going to say in the interview.

He will show them that he was the best they had ever seen, in this lifetime and the next. He will be the Van Gogh of the 20th century, the Michelangelo of the modern world.

His paintbrush never went dry in the following days, his fevered excitement showing in his brush strokes, in his pencil sketches. He never stopped for anything, not even when the family upstairs from his apartment made noise. He didn’t stop for food, or water. A fire had been lit inside him, and it was raging.

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“Hello? He He Hello?”

“Stop giggling.” 

“This is a work in progress, bitch!” she shrieks; the shadow of her arms across the pavement are misshapen, octopus flailings in the dank waters of yellow street light. “A step to recovery, a toast to the new. Ah but how weak the light flashes! You’re of no use to me anymore. Die in a ditch.”

“Real mature. How old are you again?”

“Twennyfree,” she blabbers.

“It was rhetorical.” An extension of the L as i put my hands around her neck and she gurgles and hisses and laughs. 

“Fuck this shit,” she spits on the ground. “Fuck you. I’m useless.”

I let her babble. Quarter life crisis, she says. How the hell? Self righteousness is the trend, but nobody could always be right. All rights clash; it was fun to watch. There is entertainment in drunk friends, when every gut wrenching woe, every heartbreak, each sorrow, were the funniest things in the world. 

“Whaswrongwifme? Tell me.” She weeps. 

“You are a child,” I tell her, “and you shouldn’t be drinking.”

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“Please,” he said, “let me tell you about rain.”

For a moment I thought he had passed out in his corner, and the silence hung thick over our heads, thicker than the smoke that threatened and succeeded in swallowing us whole. 

“What’s that? Did you say yes, man? Did you…say yes?” He said again and I moved my head to the direction of his voice, imagining that it was connected to a mouth, and that the mouth belonged to a body, and that was him talking from the belly of the beast.

I don’t remember when it started only that it ended so quickly.

“I once had a girl,” he said once, not too long ago in fact, “Or should I say…I had five of her.”

“Dude what?”

“It was like dating five different girls at once. She was…a different person every time.”

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