FIVE: Short Works by Oliver Zarandi

Arm

She lost her right arm in the bomb. When asked about the explosion, how it felt, she told people it felt like somebody had thrown freezing cold water all over her body and, actually, inside her body - so cold it was hot. It wasn’t true. It was a something to fill a nothing. It was filler. Her husband tried to make light of the fact that she didn’t have an arm anymore. It looks like lasagna, he said. It looks like a penis with phimosis. She didn’t laugh but that’s not to say she didn’t think it was funny. It was, in its own way, funny. Define funny, though. Funny is tragedy plus time, said her husband, who was actually quoting Woody Allen. She said that maybe comedy is Woody Allen plus time, plus his daughter. The daughter who he went on to marry and perform coitus with, she said. But what her husband noticed the most was that the house they lived in began to change. Not all at once, but gradually, item by item. First it was the fruit bowl. The kiwis, the kumquats, the apples, the mangos, the pears, the blood oranges, they began to rot. They turned green. The bowl itself, too, began to fall apart. And then it was the staircase. The balusters were loose now, like bad teeth, and eventually the husband removed an entire baluster and swung it around like a weapon. The toaster became ill. The living room changed the colour, from a lively cream to a dull grey. The toilet lid fell off and the rim just under the seat was brown and shit-stained. The microwave began to smell of vomit. They went to see a doctor. Is there anything we can do, said the husband. The doctor sat in his chair with the fingers of each hand intertwined, his head leaning on those hands, breathing through his two nostrils to suggest he was thinking of an answer. Eventually the couple decided that they weren’t just victims to the bomb, but, in fact, victims to their own biology. They began measuring each other’s hands and feet together. She began inserting things inside herself as a way of testing herself. He began inserting his genitals into spaces that could accommodate them. They began engaging with each other and their surroundings in ways they’d never thought of before.The husband suggested that maybe the removal of the arm was a blessing in disguise. The wife said let’s remove your arm then. The husband said nothing and she said, don’t worry I’m joking, I did this for you.

Oliver Zarandi is the editor of FUNHOUSE. His writing has recently appeared in Hobart, The Quietus and The Alarmist. Follow him on @funhousemag or visitwww.funhousemagazine.com

FOUR: Short Works by Oliver Zarandi

Date

Some people lose things in the war, he said. Legs, arms, eyes, ears, scalps, nipples, cocks, balls. I didn’t, he said. Was this boasting? He moved the saltshaker back and forth, but not in a way that suggested mental instability but perhaps boredom. The food arrived and he dissected the steak. I didn’t lose anything, he said. Is that right, I said. That’s right. I gained something, he said. I gained the power of the American army. I have the American army in my belt. My eyes, too. Look into my eyes, he said. I did. My eyes are made from artillery lenses from China, he said. Every night I dream that I’m in a plane, fighting clouds. He didn’t say anything else for the rest of the meal, though was it really a meal or just two people sharing a table to eat a cow at.

Amalgam

The great unwashed
of Baltimore
aboard coffin ships

Don DeLillo

Sex with him
Wasn’t sex
But a series of contests

Can your vagina
fit these
12 frankfurters in it

can your penis
fuck every hole
in the city

They said to each other 

They measured hand spans
Foot size
Height and so on 

Hours passed and
He asked again
Can your anus recite Shelley

Can your penis
dip itself in ink
and write William Styron novels 

They slept back to back
Even their spines
Were comparing each other

In sleep

THREE: Short Works by Oliver Zarandi

Talk

There was talk of poverty. There was talk of racism. There was talk about how the white appropriate the black. There was talk of bubbles, of whether there were too little or too many in the sparkling water that evening. There was talk of pregnancies, with large groups of women discussing the names of their future babies. There was talk, too, of abortions, spoken in much smaller circles, whispers in the corners of rooms, perhaps wanting to be discovered, perhaps wanting for a drama to be validated. There was talk of adultery between the men of the party, about the inner liquids of women. There was talk of the architecture of rooms, about what made a room perfect, about oblongs and rectangles, squares and pentagons, about shapes, about the physical space agreeing with the mental space of the mind. There was talk of music, of whether it was appropriate or not at an event such as this. There was talk of the war, about how it was right to do this, or how it was right to do that. There was talk of suicide, such as so and so’s friend, found hanged in a hotel room, about how it was inevitable and thank god it’s all over for him now. There was talk about the city, about Eric Orr’s Lumière light sculpture throwing light two miles into the sky from Long Beach, California, about the notions of tangible/intangible forms. There was talk of shoes, about high heels and the ankles of certain women, about the female calf versus the male calf, about back muscles in dresses, about pectorals in tuxedos, about genitalia, about the size of them, big and small, about the joy a set of genitalia can bring and, ultimately, the disappointment it brings too. There was talk about the rectilinear architecture of New York, about how restricting it was, but somebody else said no, it’s not restricting at all, depends on you, to which everybody nodded, not really knowing what was being spoken about. There was talk of life, naturally, life in the purest sense, about living, of dinners, exhibitions, sexual performance, limits, boundaries, boundaries being broken down, urinating on lovers, inserting objects into bodies, bodily transformations, laughing, smiling, enjoying the sea move. There was talk of death, of course, since ‘one doesn’t talk about life without death’ somebody else said in a limiting way, about the ways we’d like to ‘go’, maybe defenestration, maybe with a gun to the head, not to the head said a large woman, you put the gun here she said, her forefingers hooked under her top teeth and touching her palate, put the gun here and the bullet will blow your brains out of your crown, maybe being buried alive, just to try it, maybe walking into the sea hand in hand with my lover another said. There was talk of so much, but none about the main event, about why they were really here, about who they were here for and, when each person locked eyes, there was an ambiguous lubrication in each eye, maybe crying, maybe laughing, maybe the air in the room, but each person was sure that every other person didn’t know why they were there either.

TWO: Short Works by Oliver Zarandi

Abba
 

What impressed her most about Abba was their hair and bone structure. She liked the male members of the band especially. Although Bjorn and Benny looked similar, they did, in fact, have subtle differences. She liked Bjorn’s ape-like mouth, but disliked the way his beard and lips were so separate. His lips seemed plastered on, as if he’d lost them in an accident. Benny’s head was fatter and she admired his ‘confident’ hair. She believed his cranium was extremely large, similar to that of the elephant man. At the museum, she was pleased to find a piano that was directly linked to Bjorn’s piano; every time he decided to play in the privacy of his own house, it would play out in the museum in real time. She wondered if there was a Bjorn penis and if, when he decided he wanted sex, it would fuck her in real time too. As she moved further into the museum, she found a room of costumes that the men had worn. She felt like climbing into one of the costumes and cocooning herself there, warm and distant from reality.

Things
 

A great man began to drop things. He used to be able to hold the crockery, his colleagues said. They still revered him and respected him. He has really nice hair, said one student. It’s grey but not stringy. Other people on the campus congratulated him on his kind nature and ability to pick up shy woodland creatures. His thinking, his reasoning, it’s unparalleled. But then, one day in the staff room, he began to drop everyday objects. His hands would go stiff, fingers stretched out and he would drop cups, plates, forks and knives. He would move to the other side of the room and stay in a corner. The younger staff members began to make a note of all the things he dropped: teapot, duck figurine, satchel, watch, pen, pencil, protractor, pile of books, tumbler, chair, duck figurine, wig.

ONE: Short Works by Oliver Zarandi

Swimming Pools

I love you most in the swimming pool. This is what she said to him. He wondered why she had said this here and not somewhere else. Was it, perhaps, that she held a certain power over him in the pool. Her genitals were unaltered by the cold of the water. His had taken the form of a child’s and she had them cupped in her hand. 

Outside of the pool, the relationship was not as strong. On rooftop bars she ignored him and found solace in concrete. In the streets she would be talking to him and then she wasn’t. She said that maybe things weren’t working. That maybe she loved the places more than she loved him. She admitted that she had had sex with a street bollard and that she held a conversation with a lamppost. He said what about us? and she was already kissing the bricks of a white townhouse.

Bricks

It began as a catastrophe. At ground level, it was just smoke. Smoke and glass. And after the smoke settled, the sky was nuclear white in the city. The street was paved with the glass of financial buildings, mirroring the white of the sky, creating a double sky. On that sky walked a man, in what seemed sixteen layers of clothing, picking up debris. He picked up a brick and carried it as he walked on the sky. He put it down somewhere else, not far from where he originally picked it up. The people from a distance made bets on whether he was friend or enemy. Soon many people, dressed in similar attire, began doing the same. People were moving bricks from the centre of the road to the side of the road. We made bets on whether they were going to rebuild the city brick by brick, but instead of where the buildings originally stood, the new buildings would be just off to the right, perhaps like a new city, born again thanks to the explosion.

Oliver Zarandi is the editor of FUNHOUSE. His writing has recently appeared in Hobart, The Quietus and The Alarmist. Follow him on @funhousemag or visit www.funhousemagazine.com