Fiction: The Undecidable Figure Of The Penrose Life

By Ron Arbuckle

Everything is a bell-curve. And the bell-curve is a horseshoe. And the horseshoe is a spiral. And the spiral is oscillating through space and time in undulating concentric circles. It’s a bad week for me to crash out on the timeline. But each morning I awake to new existential threats. Will a blowout on my morning commute place me in the path of a weary insomniac, consciousness stitched together with Red Bull and uppers, who transforms me into a stain on the shoulder of the highway in an instant? I’m not afraid of heights, but on the roof, fixing burning hot shingles clutched tightly between my legs, the image of Brent’s ICU stays, his face a bruised contused mess, flashes through my mind bearing with it the prospect of a slip, fall, and the subsequent bleeding brain inside my own skull. Flash floods carry away tractor trailers just as easily as cabins full of pigtails. I’m sorry for the way I spoke when the raw chicken and pork water touched the knife in the sink; Salmonella and trichinosis paranoia haunt me in my dreams, thanks to an abundance of government messaging. Pools of water left to stand outside bring mosquito larvae and West Nile, disease injected straight into the bloodstream. Credit card debt can’t kill you, but it polishes the trigger each night. Has the cancer entered our bones already? Like a wild hare on a county road, the footsteps of the coming automobiles send me scrambling for cover in the tall grass. The days are long and the nights, more so. In my frenzy to escape, unbeknownst to me, I will find solace in my appointment with the Angel of Death in Samarra this evening. I have contorted myself into impossible three-dimensional shapes, only to learn I was 2D all along.

 

 

 

 

 

Ron Arbuckle lives in Oklahoma. He is the author of the novel, A Matter of Design. His writing is published or forthcoming in Expat Press, Blood+Honey, Hawkeye, GONZOID, Trash Cat Lit, Citywide Lunch, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, BULL, Hidden Peak Press, Plague Circus Press, Some Words, serious-lit, La Rotonde, The Militant Grammarian & The Gorko Gazette.