It wasn’t until Trevor started crawling on the ground blindly, having an intense hand-covering-mouth crying fit and moaning “Ow, why would you do that” in step with his arrhythmic palpitations and sobs that the crowd became incrementally less and less interested in the scene and leisurely began wandering back into the hazy, strobing house. After […]
Ryan Allen
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Half-heard, Chapter 32
Audible through the fluorescent strobing party light-hued fog machine murk were huddled shapes chinwagging over the psyche of David Lynch’s oeuvre while passing around Trevor’s vaporizer, joints and a pizza box. Their diarrheic jabbering over the parallels between Manson (Marilyn)’s Mechanical Animals and Lost Highway was arrhythmically punctuated by constant misuse of “bemused” over “amused,” […]
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Half-heard, Chapter 33
Outside under the sickly pale August moon that barely hung over the opening of the canopy of sidewalk trees, soundtracked by the far-away threnody of a disorganized quartet’s unintentionally sad rendition of Hoople/Bowie’s “All The Young Dudes,” were now 80 irrevocably intoxicated party-persons gathered around a full-fledged street-brawl between two guys that held David and […]
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Half-heard, Chapter 31
At his house, he sat in his room and wondered: What else is there to know about the roommates? He’d been listening in on them for months by this point. Wouldn’t learning more about them just make them less reducible to media-constructed paradigms of twentysomething-ites? Wouldn’t all the incongruities, fluff and trivialities that fill in […]
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Half-heard, Chapter 30
Friday afternoon. Myles’ shadow descended over a mountain of combusted garbage bags hurled carelessly over the uneven tufts of dried, blonde grass outside his and Welnot’s house. In typical pre-party cleanup fashion, the Northwood roommates put everything that couldn’t fit under couches or in closets into garbage bags and tossed it out the door. Sarah […]
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Half-heard, Chapter 29
The same nuclear sundown projected itself against the bell-clear sky outside Myles’ bedroom window while long-necked Myles laid in his room, stared up at the full-length mirror above his bed polishing his small-talk and adjusting the parameters of his hand gestures with a needle-point precision. Motions cranked with an awkward rigidity like shoddy ratchets in the […]
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Half-heard, chapter 28
The sunset beams in a kind of aqueous way this time of year, hitting the house and slowly dripping down the walls. And the earlier-than-usual glow of late August’s pre-dusk has a kind of sad Technicolor movie hue to it. The living room can look like it’s front row to a dimming sun’s last gasp […]
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Half-heard, chapter 26
For whatever reason, unemployment was the norm for the roommates during the academic off-season in Halifax. Perhaps it was the exhaust-rich air that attenuated the constitutions of the student class, turning them to slugs seeking society’s shade, or an entitlement created by creditors and entertainment industry’s subjects with lives full of upper-urban decadence, constantly entrenched […]
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Half-heard, chapter 25
The North End Plant Snatcher was by all official reports an unknown maybe-kleptomaniac/maybe-botanophile who ransacked households mid-soiree, right under the tenants’ own noses. If you asked anyone in the social-circles extending between north-north and north-western parts of the city, a guy named Steve was the culprit and irrefutably so, who could be discovered to be […]
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Half-heard, chapter 24
Sarah and Myles conversed a while longer. When Sarah felt distressed she was able to keep herself on stable psychological footing by talking it out. If in stasis she’d probably have let herself jump to the furthest conclusions and plot the most damaging feats for reparations. She’d already be at Gert’s door demanding to see what […]
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Half-heard, chapter 23
Sarah revealed that she saw three small tied-off latex baggies of who-knows-what fall out of the backside of Gertraud’s pajama shorts, and Myles’ eyes forwardly displaced themselves a comically gruesome distance out of his sockets, so far out in fact that Sarah would later tell friends that she had only seen that kind of eye-pop […]
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Half-heard, chapter 22
“It’s kind of a weird story.” “I got time,” Myles said, awkwardly. He caught himself remembering a detective from a Dick Tracy-type movie saying the same thing to a distressed client at a bar and felt a little embarrassed. Myles waited for her to share. Quiet between people scared Myles. As it—the quiet—lengthens it becomes […]