Dear Brooklyn Bridge,

Today a woman came on the train who very sad. I wish I could describe to you how sad she was. She said that she had children and that she could not feed them. She was bent over in such a way that I believed her. I was on the F train. It doesn’t go across you, but under you and you know I have always thought that that was such a shame because you have such a magnificent view. But anyway, I gave her a dollar. I watched but I don’t believe that anyone else did. I hope that you will watch over her please.

Thank you mighty bridge,

Joe

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Brooklyn Bridge, Joe Takanara, letters

Here now in the dark of four in the morning, the din of the clubs and bars from earlier in the evening still roaring in his ears, Jason is cautiously approaching the tub in the courtyard. In his hand: an empty prescription bottle from inside his wrecked apartment. Greeted by overturned chairs, table, strewn books and papers, he doesn’t suspect burglary. He suspects something sadder—hurt. As he walks through the back of the apartment, out to the courtyard he spies, perched up on the wall, two small cats. They are watching the tub—but not the carp. One, a noble gray cat named Muriel and the other, a small calico named Marilyn, stare curiously at a scene they’ve not witnessed before. The pair sit cuddled side-by-side and peer as Jason breeches the shadow of the nook, and the city’s ever-ambient light fills the scene bluely. There in the dark water of the tub is Elsa, soaked in an H&M summer dress. She looks up at him, eyes half-closed, drugged, but smiling. “Look,” she says and hauls the carp up out of the water into the air where it wriggles in her hands. “I caught him!” she says and then laughs loudly. She holds the fish to her face and looks carefully at it, kisses it and sets it free in the water again. She watches it swim and sniffles, then covers her face in her hands.

“They hate me.”

Jason and the cats watch, perplexed. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, but…” he steps over to the tub and stoops. “I love you.”

She peers from behind her hands, shocked.

“Sorry. I’ve had a bit to drink, but yeah. I do.”

Elsa smiles brightly, tears running down her face. “Jason Gunn.”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Elsa Finch,” she holds out one hand to shake.

Jason looks at her hand and then her, “Fibocin.”

She takes back her hand. Suddenly, she frowns, “I love you, also, but…” she looks around herself, the state she’s in.

“You’re fine. I got your back.”

She sloshes water out of the tub as she reaches out to grab him in a hug. They kiss.

Read the whole story so far: Untouchable

Characters and Places: drugs, Elsa Fibocin, Jason Gunn, regrets

Later on, back at his own office he finds himself drifting as he looks over the angiogram of a patient. With a synaptic level map, the precision of his work would become unprecedented. Suddenly the angiogram looks ridiculous, a magnifying glass compared to an electron microscope. Ridiculous! He turns to his office window, his glassy, glossy search light eyes staring out into the new world. And somewhere in the back of his own brain, in the back of his mind too, he feels a part of him rotting and seizing up because of that lack of precision.

“Dr. Coburn?”

Back still turned, “Yes.”

“The Dreyfuses are here, along with doctors Flynn and Schanacter.”

Read the whole story so far: The Memory Thief

Characters and Places: Jacob Coburn, meetings

Day -183, March 12, 5:30:00am

There is a click and the alarm sounds. Joe rolls over and hits the snooze button, looks up at the ceiling and closes his eyes again. Thank God it’s Friday. He pushes the covers off and slides his feet to the floor, sitting up in bed. Standing and stretching he makes his way into the kitchen to turn the coffee pot on, all set up to begin brewing the night before.

Day -180, March 15, 5:36:12am

He grabs a mug from the cabinet that reads “Cafe Ground” and pours himself a cup of coffee. He slurps it black and stares through the tiny window in his kitchen that looks down into the alleyway and across the next roof at the East River. Nothing is stirring and he watches the light of the sun begin to wash across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Beatrice, Brooklyn, Joe Takanara, The Engine

Day -204, February 19, 5:30:00am

There is a click and the alarm sounds. Joe rolls over and hits the snooze button, looks up at the ceiling and cannot close his eyes again. Happy Birthday. He pushes the covers off and slides his feet to the floor, sitting up in bed. Standing and stretching he makes his way into the kitchen to turn the coffee pot on, all set up to begin brewing the night before.

Day -201, February 22, 5:30:00am

There is a click and the alarm sounds. Joe rolls over and hits the snooze button, looks up at the ceiling and closes his eyes again. There are a few minutes of pleasant silence followed by the alarm again. He pushes the covers off and slides his feet to the floor, sitting up in bed. Standing and stretching he makes his way into the kitchen to turn the coffee pot on, all set up to begin brewing the night before.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Brooklyn, Joe Takanara, New York City, The Engine

As the Manhattan bridge is washed in the blue light of dusk, a train ambles out across it. The thunderous steel wheels are heard up and down the East River. The rumbling bounces and dodges down the Engine’s streets as if the streets were built to manufacture echoes and pour them out into the sky in a territorial roar. The cry washes out over the water and bounces off every surface. There is the hum from the FDR to compete. Then the sound of a helicopter in the distance whirs one part of a swarm and dissonant harmony. Here and there is the high pitched scream of a 747 banking toward La Guardia. A million sounds are made and wash into one another until all that is left is the call and cry of the Engine. Her teeth are piled and cracked within Her massive maw and with horrid odor She heaves a sigh of desire. A sigh for more. Night has come and gone in an instant because she has seen so much time, and She is still hungry. The sigh, the morning flush of steam from manhole covers comes from being tired of being hungry.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: The Engine

Who sees the whole of the tides of the myriad small creatures living within Her? A bee will hum and dance and see its song passed from comrade to comrade and so the hive will have knowledge but only the hive, not the bee. No such dance, no knowledge, no plan grants any bee a blueprint from which to explain the direction or the anatomy. The Engine knows. Only She knows. To them, her little masters—so easily predicted—–there is a dizzying complex. She is too old not to see the pattern and to know She masters her bees. She is no mere machine; she is their complex. And so She sees the need. She sees the potential. She hears them one thousand—one hundred thousand times over—–their pleadings and cries, their wins and successes, their suffering and escape… but to Her, there is a plan, a design, an intent. They do not know it. She wants. Their begging and praying is useless and unless it serves Her, pointless.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: The Engine

She is an animal with a stride that measures square miles, makes steps with an island that is a million-footed force, feet unrepenting and descending upon Her own constant reconstituted pavement. She builds herself. The bees pour Her concrete. And Her creeping steel and brick and mortar and scaffold wash swallow whole old structures or painfully birth the new amidst teeth and sludge, new and shiny appendages: organs, cinder blocks, fins, fans, spikes, glass, claws, and insulation. She is a diabolical machine full of grace and hate and miraculously freed from the tedious cycles of her brethren machinery, though She surely is a machine. Her minuscule ancestors whirl and spin, pound and break, rust and choke and are discarded in trenches and pits miles wide away on one of her shoulders to be buried en masse. She grieves these refuse piles, but can’t but want more and leaves her brethren behind. It is the only way to gain control of the little masters. Having served their purpose, her tiny metal brethren are laid down in beds of doors and mattresses, paper and cardboard, fast food bags and old shoes, pieces of ventilation and chain-link fences, to rust for eternity. Fantastic diesel spewing backhoes and bulldozers, trucks and jackhammers are left behind in the name of her legacy—like an ancient queen buried with her slaves; and worse, the queen isn’t dead and the queen is the tomb. Mere tools designed by the minds of the little masters, even small devices will only their makers’ work accomplish. Over and over her brethren do the same thing again and again—a repetition that only Her consciousness is vast enough to know the horror of. They are, at the end of the day, too dumb to see the pattern. And though these noble husks of metal helped to build her, the Engine knows that no such fate ever awaits Her, for none of the little masters know the Engine; that seen from orbit glows like a luminescent fungus out into the solar system. Who sees the pattern of creation and destruction of this vast pile?

The Engine does.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: The Engine

It is hard to hear her over the noise of the bar. Jason mouths “Elsa” to Jess who makes a stern face and points at him. He gives her a thumbs up and takes the phone outside.

Read the whole story so far: Untouchable

Characters and Places: Elsa Fibocin, Jason Gunn, Jessica Hauser

“Don’t look now, but there’s your girlfriend.”

“What! Where?” Jason looks around eagerly but feels stupid for doing it at the same time. Two months. Two months of a few days of crazy infatuation and lust and attention inevitably followed by days or weeks without a word. No emails, no returned phone calls, silence until she would surface again as if nothing had happened.

“Up there.” Jess points across the intersection of Houston and Broadway up toward the top of an office building where Elsa stands four stories tall in a grey bejeweled Chanel gown against a flat white background. She is standing with her back to the street and is turning around to look over her shoulder as if someone has disturbed her and she’s angry about it.

“That’s great.”

Read the whole story so far: Untouchable

Characters and Places: advertising, Elsa Fibocin, Jason Gunn, Jessica Hauser