In this Issue:
Doe in Specs
When you're an optician you tend to notice glasses, especially on a deer. There I was, same as every morning, walking along the rail trail, and there she was in mid-path, a mid-sized doe. About a hundred yards ahead (but I have first-class eyesight) with her white tail turned towards me. Such encounters were commonplace; I kept walking. As I grew closer, however, she turned to face me and I saw: circular lenses and stylish blue frames. Arms perched crookedly on her nose as if the glasses might fly off any moment. Read more...
The train stopped three stations earlier than I'd expected. This is the terminus. All passengers must leave the train. Wait for a connection to reach your destination. I'd thought getting to NotcIiff required no connection. I shut my book and limped onto the platform. I'd twisted my ankle more badly than I thought.
The station was dank, airless; a livid platform bisected by a slate-blue brick building. Electronic countdown boards hung in the non-air on either side.
A red bench faced the rails, already occupied by a person. I say he was a person, but he was specifically a man dressed in a navy-blue uniform. Read more...
The sign wasn't big enough. Drove by it three times. Finally I saw it hanging over the entrance of a nondescript and poorly lit storefront: blocky black letters on pale green vinyl. In the wan dusk light, I could barely decipher it. Business must have been slow. Adjacent storefronts looked abandoned, bombed out. The neighborhood had not yet recovered from the last catastrophe, or the one before that. Sadly, this had become a commonplace.
Two of the paladins from my Opera dei pupi cast—Ruggero and Ferragut—needed upgrades after a record number of performances that past year. They were looking a little ragged. Read more...
I once met a bird that wasn't a bird, and it blinked twice with no eyelids before vanishing into a floor made of old mail. Things like this don't come up when people speak of time or truth. But if you stare long enough at a corner of a room you've never cleaned, you might hear the carpet breathing.
The boy, whose name was not important and probably never existed, woke up upside-down again. His ceiling had grown windows—real ones, with curtains and little flowerpots. This was the third time this week.
His mother used to say, "We don't own gravity, dear, it's borrowed." She stopped saying that after she floated through the toaster and didn't return. Read more...
Let's say our man has never been here before, but now, driving through the state on business, he finds himself on Main Street in some small town in the middle of the country. Let's say he finds himself in Kansas, in a town where old storefronts line both sides of Main Street, and on the south side in the middle of one such block a sign out front says
Good Food Slats' Pool Hall
Our man parks his car.
He is hungry. Read more...
1.
We begin with fog, the color of sleep, curling against an empty parking lot. A tire swing spins on a fierce wind. Somewhere, a dog barks and the bark splits into two—one for this world, one for the world below. The sun is a cracked yolk leaking into gutters. In the distance: a child rides a bicycle through the frame, never to return.
2.
A woman folds origami out of broken glass. A crow pecks Morse code into a loaf of bread. There’s a television in every room playing only static, except at midnight, when the static hums the national anthem backwards. Read more...
About Our Coffee and Other Fare
Please Note: All of the coffee served at The Irreal Cafe is fair trade, organic, shade-grown and not real. All of the food served at The Irreal Cafe is organic, vegan, locally sourced and not real. See "At Our Cafe" for more about what we would serve at The Irreal Cafe and how we would serve it if there were an Irreal Cafe.