
Paul Evan Hughes
Broken: A Plague Journal
The Silver Trilogy: Book Three
“You’ve blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It’s as though I cannot even remember what I once desired! All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself─and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified─at least that’s what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart, Japril. In a single gesture you’ve turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you’ve shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don’t have it.”
ALPHA
and all broken tomorrows: bracketing those dead to us, delineating the forms and histories of our desires, in a breath, in tears, in the pattern two opposing collections of striation compose in the catalytic reaction of palm to palm, all physics are bent, and all probabilities, all convenient presuppositions and extrapolations of futures not yet lived are erased: all we have is now, this moment, this beautiful, fragile moment, and
He inhaled.
“Storm’s coming in.”
