flawnt » faces

03:46 a.m. – Houston, Texas

flawnt — Sun, 02 May 2010 20:59:13 +0000

― The security man is on guard, alone. He’s fat and he feels old enough to be his own father. He walks through the tunnels under the city. Every night on duty he wonders about the people who clean the food and the gunk off the floor a few hours before he begins his rounds. It makes him a little hungry to think that. It is a tad chilly because they don’t heat the underground pathways at night in this city of energy. Bunch of bozos, he thinks, I don’t want to run into a bunch of bozos. He likes the sound of that. But the passage is locked shut now, nobody could get here. His boots make clicking sounds on the marble floor. His wife’s stilettos. He misses her. The scent of a woman’s neck: why is it so hard to find someone who smells right. Suddenly, his flashlight goes out and he feels the darkness lick him all over with a giant velvety tongue, tender yet daunting . At that moment he knows that he’s in a giant anthill, that he’s walking towards his grave and that he must get out of here as fast as he can to stay alive. He begins to run.

(Excerpt from ‘Faces’ – all of the Earth’s 24 time zones on Christmas Eve)

01:46 – San Diego, California

flawnt — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:48:03 +0000

― Something very strange happened to me today as I came out of the homeless shelter in the small hours. An ill wind blew from the sea and I wished I had camped out on the beach instead, but then I remembered they don’t let you do that anymore for fear you might soil the pristine waterfront. The joggers don’t like us. They want to look out over the sea and feel good about themselves before they disappear in their glass cubicles to make the world go round. As if. The strange thing that happened wasn’t a thing as much as a woman in pyjamas, who seemed to have lost her way. She reminded me of Virginia Woolf. You know who I mean and you get the picture. She drifted past me like a specter but I wasn’t drunk and I knew that she was real. As I looked, she turned round, came back and stood in front of me just like you now, only closer, much closer, so that I could smell her womanhood. Man, I was hungry, I was tired, I was sick, but that made me feel so good, I can’t tell you. She said only one thing to me hardly opening her lips, said it to my bare, stubbly face, which made me feel as if I had brushed against fine gauze: ‘You’re lovely, Gary’. She said that, I swear, she said it twice even and it made my day.

22:46 hrs – Auckland, New Zealand

flawnt — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:32:46 +0000

― The two Art Deco houses stood in a valley on Tuarangi Road next to one another, in view of the highway leading downtown. For some strange reason, one could not hear the cars near the houses. Two families of artists lived in these buildings, which were too small for their perennially expanding minds, but were loved for their almost human daintiness. Their backyards were swampy despite the occupants’ earnest attempts at draining the land. The artists’ sculptures rested on the wet grass. Whenever a new sculpture appeared like a big friendly giant, the children were the first to claim it by climbing all over it, unsupervised except by the huge eucalyptus trees by the side of the road, who curiously peeked over the fence.

24 faces of the Earth in 24 hours on Christmas Eve.
Next stop: Kiritimati, Christmas Island. Published in: Blue Print Review, issue 24.

15:46 hrs – Baghdad, Al Iraq

flawnt — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 06:30:25 +0000

From a new project – 24 faces of the Earth in 24 hours.

The policemen came storming in the plaza, perhaps twenty of them. Despite their uniforms and silly hats they looked like all the other people, scared, disoriented, perhaps that’s why I lingered, holding on to my bag of groceries. I stood not far away from the large man, whom they had come for: he wore a bright red, heavy coat lined with white fur and he looked friendly, like God. I waved and he smiled at me before the paddy pack took him down.