Billy had been out in the sun for far too long. He didn't know exactly what desert he was in, or whether he had been wandering in circles for days or hours, or how much further he could go without a drink or a morsel. He kept his ears on guard for the sound of the sea, any sign that he was near to home, but aside from the rising and falling of dust that had been pried loose from the deserts deeply cut ridges there was only silence. Not even the rattle of a deathsnake. He wondered if they had killed him after all, and if this was hell, or, worse, heaven. Since the attack, the sky was no longer blue in appearance, only a tantalizing greyish orange. There was only haze, and not a welcoming cloud to be seen; no moisture at all.

The days were only measurable by the vanishing of the orange into a darker orange, and the slight relief of cold sand at night. Billy no longer rested during these hours, however, and continued on, his lips silently forming the shapes of human words, phrases, songs.

She takes pictures with her endless supply of exploding flashbulbs and paints her face to match the rest of the parade. Sometimes the kinderen mistake her for a member of the clowns, and she takes delight in that.

Flashbulbs had a short life expectancy in those days. With a certain amount of stress they were known to explode-- to shatter and sometimes burst all over the subject of the picture. Eventually, smart people fixed this with a bit of properly applied enamel to strengthen the cracks in the bulb, and from there all manner of impressive technology was born. Of course, none of this concerned me when I was taking pictures. I was very good at snapping, but remained purposefully, dedicatedly ignorant of the mechanics of photography. At the time I didn't feel as though artists should know or care about those things, that we were more about expressing feelings and ideas all bottled in a single moment. Later, I was reminded that we all have our tools, and at the very least we should know how to manipulate them.

That was the year I had run away to join the circus. They called themselves a Carnival, actually, and traveled mainly Germany. It was my dream to capture the freakish, free-wheeling life from the beaten trail that I suppose everyone longed to live at the time but which the circus proved possible. Not only did the traveling band seem so beautifully free, they were far from the vagabonds that my family was always so quick to compare me to and warn me against-- their palette did not consist of browns and greys and the shabby, dreariness that I was running away from.

pink cigarettes

She had started smoking in a bar in Madrid in a desperate bid to stop herself from drinking to an outrageous extent. In Spain it seemed as though the moment a girl was seen to stop moving she was an easy target, the sitting duck of the bar, especially if she happened to be pretty and saucer-eyed like Patricia. Therefore girls took care to always have a glass in their hand or a cigarette wrapped up in their long fingers. It eased the nervousness and made them seem a little taller, a little older than the wolves on the other side of the room, or at least their match when it came to battle.

children.

there's an archway between wings of mckay, where the door is. it's about five paces or something. there's a daycare out towards the parking lot, and every other day the kids get taken out on a stroll on the campus. going by mckay is first, so the archway is very exciting. they think it's a tunnel and when they go under it they make as much noise as possible to hear the echo (though there's not really one). so around 10:30 many mornings one hears a group of little voices going "LALALALALA!" it was annoying as hell at first, but I look forward to it now.

oh that man.

One eye was made of a pinwheel. Not a spinning toy that protruded out from his face, of course, but rather a tiny spinning wheel inserted into the eye-shaped socket.

joey

And then her heart exploded, and love went everywhere. It dripped from the ceiling, soaked into the floor, stained the curtains. it ran into the street, richocheted from the buildings, flooded the beaches, enveloped all of them in its permanence; love love love.