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By Root 1029 0

certain precaution before making honey from it on the contrary from your surroundings shapes and noise in the house maybe joyfully but still sort of always the same thing joyful toothless that is pretty little might as well say almost nothing next to two bumblebees in the left ear and the right ear and a sty on your eye first and then deafness and glaucoma the next day and stiffness of the hands and feet and the mouth and lights out of love to the disgust with moving and saying the essential minimum not to mention vain naïve pain and fatigue because well all that why again what can you say if not to warn once again about what whoever didn’t already happen every day and before days of a necessary or optional absence or presence for the proper functioning of the troops or the end of hostilities how to know without foreseeing the ability to worry or despair generating reactions of joy explosions of hatred but I should be asleep already gone to or remained asleep here or there in the same state of a dead or ignorant ignored thing.)

“Nothing? No news is good news. Did you buy some wine at the Nicolas store?”

“Meursault.”

“What’s that package wrapped up with tape?”

“It was in my mailbox this morning. It must be the iPod you ordered on eBay for Chloe’s birthday.”

“Cool! Did you see my leopardskin tights?”

“You dyed your hair again?”

“Yes, to relax a little. I went to the bank because of that business of unpaid rent, it’s a crazy story.”

“It’s always a crazy story.”

“We’ve never been so alone, fused together in the same madness,lost in a world that has the consistency of a fantasy, it worriesus to death.I read that in a book by Dardenne, I’m going to write something about it.”

“You’re lucky you can still write.”

(As for me, all I’m good at is waiting for the results of the biopsy. It’s like waiting for a verdict. Ten years, twenty years? A few weeks? And at the same time I don’t give a damn. Nothing I can do about it. The die is cast.)

“Where are the kids?”

“Julien’s at his PlayStation and Chloe’s sleeping over at her girlfriend’s.”

(I have no power over their lives. Here or not here, same thing. I floundered around all day whereas the street was straight. I screwed around, I nearly, I don’t know what I nearly did, I nearly did something I didn’t do I didn’t smile enough, I looked pissed off all day, not what you call an honorable exit.)

“When do you get the results?”

“I don’t give a shit.”

“Talk louder, I’m in the shower.”

Nobody pays attention to me with my dickhead and my asshole. The world turns. Women blossom. China is catching up with the rest of the world. I go out without waiting. Waiting for what?

Closing Time

It’s cold, night. Rue d’Alésia, deserted. Shutters closed. Bar-tabac shop lit up. I’m in the café at the very bottom of rue Gla-cière and rue de la Santé, the light in the jailhouse is diffuse at night, it isn’t lit. Walls eat up the blackness of the sky. Anemic streetlights shining very weakly on the barbed wire. The street is full of murders, fits of madness, creeping illnesses, and a whole planned contagion. The threat of an epidemic, gangrene. Dirty tricks. Everything is maintained there, a shadow zone, like a nuclear power plant. You have the feeling something’s going to happen, finally.

I’m reading a crime book by Albert Camus. Reading and writing for oneself and not counting on other people is a way of being French, being a zero from A to Z. So I’m reading TheStranger. I am that stranger. It’s a way of being out of it, being here by chance, in transit.

“Get out of here,” the manager says. “We’re closing up. You’ve read enough, dickhead.”

“I’m finishing the page, boss.”

I took a step, one step, forward. And this time, without getting up, the Arab drew his knife and held it up to me inthe sun. The light shot off the steel and it was like a longflashing blade cutting at my forehead … My whole beingtensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. Thetrigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; andthere … is where it all started.

The light went out, the café closed. Everything