MARK GOSZYLA

Excerpt from Everything Is Obvious After It Happens

A ship of fools and the captain’s dog won’t let anybody sleep with it in the lifeboat. The drop of the egg into the frying pan spitting bits of bacon grease onto the stovetop and somehow that means everything’s going to be alright. The golden run of yolk across the plate, and the tongue that wants to chase it. The mouse’s tail spied underneath the coffee table like a finger of frost on the windowpane of morning, like one of those people talking about America as if it could be anything other than a conspiracy theory.

At best, we’re the best. At worst, we chew cold meatballs. Drink cheap beer. Go raspberry picking in a patch full of poison ivy. Talk about desperation. Delirium. Diagram on bar napkins the ways the beginning of the end and the end are not the same thing. Both are reminders to attend to the things you can: go see a movie, cut the grass, try not to get caught by the camera picking your nose.

Stop looking for the end, or it will never arrive. Just a dialogue with the horse at the edge of the woods. You say that there’s a problem. I have no problem acknowledging that that problem is me. You say it takes all the sugar we have left in the house to make the tea sweet enough to drink. My new favorite word is the German zugzwang, the move that gives your enemy victory. You say that’s impossible because conmen all sell the same thing: themselves. That blah-blah-blah feeling of an ambitious recycling project just beginning.