The Interrogation. Michael Bazzett

target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ue3a6a788-add1-5f31-a81f-1731e9e58d7c">The Phone Call

      2  Lazarus

      3  The Birth

      4  When He Was a Boy

      5  The Fable of the Man

      6  Early November

      7  Country Squire Landscape Services

       IV

      1  Confessions

      2  Island

      3  Other Names for Fire

      4  The Fact

      5  The Mechanic

      6  The Encounter

      7  Gag

      8  Rain

      9  Last Exit

      10  The Telepathic Heart

      11  For the Person I Have Not Met

      12  On the Subway

      13  Miles

      14  I Went to the Market

      15  The Book of My Life

       V

      1  [the words I have not written]

      2  They

      3  The Handshake

      4  The Meat of It

      5  In the Book

      6  The Hole

      7  The Little Things

      8  The Monster

      9  The Two of Us

      10  Almost Invisible

      11  The Light

      12  The Plot

        Acknowledgments

        About the Author

       Cruelty

      Then you walk into a sodden field.

      It is early and smells of rain and pine.

      You sense sun beyond the thin clouds.

      The earth mushes beneath each footfall

      and buried twigs snap beneath your soles.

      Soon you are standing before a fence

      made of two strands of rusted wire.

      Tufts of hair are caught on its barbs,

      lifting in the wind like animals.

      Beyond the fence is a blank fog.

      You cannot quite make out those

      gathered in the whiteness beyond.

      You hear only the clink of cutlery

      and a child crying. There will

      be no gunfire, no serrated light.

      The cold will be enough, as always.

       I

       The City

      Once we were ten miles outside the city, it

      vanished completely. We suspected this

      happened from the top down, with television

      antennae fading into ether and asphalt

      shingles glimmering, like fish scales,

      then flecking into nothingness.

      For a mere

      moment buildings were reduced to rib cage,

      people illuminated within the lattice of beams,

      bent over ironing boards and countertops,

      chopping cucumbers into slender green coins

      until they and their knives and even the blade-

      scarred board had vanished into empty air.

      But there were also those who asserted

      buildings softened into something like

      sodden cardboard and settled slowly into

      themselves. One contingent even claimed

      nothing happened at all: the city simply

      shifted like a sleeping animal, dreaming

      of our return.

      We decided to confirm

      our top-down theory by hiding a camera

      in