Brian Kenneth Swain

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Vladimir Nabokov Where am I? Why is it so dark? Jesus, my head hurts. I hope I haven’t overslept again. Weathers’ll have a conniption if I do. I knew I should’ve stopped at two glasses of wine last night. Now I’m gonna’ be miserable all day. Why the hell is everything so dark? Wake up, Rachel. C’mon girl, get with it. It is morning, early morning, or at least it feels that way insofar as it feels like anything, absent nearly all external cues. Rachel awakens after what feels like a fitful night’s sleep. A very dim gray light bathes her, the sort of light familiar to those who arise before dawn. Its source cannot be determined directly, yet somehow ...

Cum tacent clamant[2] M. Tullius Cicero I suspect today will be worse than yesterday. Waking from my standing half-sleep, I hear the collective incessant moaning of my companions. Their voices are softer this morning, but resonate more persistently than before, suggesting an unabated but now resigned level of pain and anxiety. It has been over twelve hours since we were packed ovine into this dank dark railroad car. I know this because the sun was nearly set when we were first put aboard, and now I can see through a wide crack in the car’s timber wall the sun as it begins its slow bitter crawl into the gray sky. We are one hundred souls – strangers whose only ties are country and faith, but whose fates now inexorably entwine along a ...

“I don’t even like animals. Why the hell do I always get the animals?” Gabe whined, walking toward the sink, tugging impatiently on the jammed fly of his black silk slacks. “Shit! Now my shirt’s caught in the zipper. Man, I just got this shirt…Goddamn it!” “Hey, you better watch it with that GD business. The wrong person hears you, and it’s gonna be your ass, you know? Besides, better your shirt than something else getting caught in there, eh?!” “Yeah, I know,” Gabe replied, finally extricating the fabric from the zipper mechanism. “It just pisses me off, getting stuck with animals again. Just once I’d like to prove I can do something else…something bigger, you know?” “Hey, what can I say? I guess you must ...

There comes an unexpected brusque knock at the front door, which really sucks what with Wheel of Fortune just coming out of commercial and Buster having astutely deduced the phrase-in-question to be FLYING FUCK (which if correct would be delightfully refreshing for daytime television and might mean that the correct phrase is in fact FLYING FROG, even though that makes far less apparent sense than his guess, but he supposes it is equally likely at this point being as how neither U, C, K, R, O, or G have been guessed yet by either contestant) besides which he is one hundred and seven Christ-awful years old and how in the hell can’t whoever is at the front door know or at least reasonably infer that it takes him no less than ten tortuous ...