I’m the first and last man on Earth. Trying to put the “cry” in “cryogenics.” I can’t think of the word “firmament,” and then there it is, overhead, like a smashed bird. Planet Will crashes through solid fog, so lonely and slow, sporting a stone monocle, looking to invent sadder and lesser knowns. He’s had a “cold spell.” He wears a black hole as a belly button. He’s holding a birthday bouquet. He says, “No one. Nowhere. Not much. No such thing.” He says “tunnel vision” to mean wet and dirgy and nearing a portal. He says “runaway” to mean run inward and outward, backwards and forwards, telepathically and atmospherically. Will always follows “life” with “left,” abandons his car on a cliff, hangs above the world’s gray mouth, doesn’t make a splash. For an afterparty, he reenacts the sea burial in a pile of leaves and lays there in silent relief. He tells himself: “You don’t have to believe. You can blow out the candles. Language isn’t language at all.” You Don’t Have to Believe in the World by William Erickson (April Gloaming, 2024).
