White Dialogues by Bennett Sims

Author:Bennett Sims
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio

City of Wolfmen

Directions

The city of wolfmen is the city of wolfmen only one night a month. For the rest of the month, it cannot be found on any map. Passing through a town of hirsute men, their forearms strong and calves thick, one may ask them where he can find the city of wolfmen: they will not know what he is talking about. If a gas-station attendant spreads a county map across the hood of the man’s car and points at the highway there, his finger will fall on emptiness. The city of wolfmen is illustrated in invisible ink. The ink is visible only in full moonlight. The dot of it rises out of the map’s paper one night every month, then withdraws, like a fever blister.

Museums

There are no museums in the city of wolfmen because no one remembers the city of wolfmen the morning after. Its citizens wake up naked in zoos and in parks, in beds of forest leaves and of jacaranda petals, in each other’s front lawns and in the middles of streets, and the city is governed for one day by stupefaction. Do you remember last night? they ask each other, and none ever do. The tattered clothes and shed hair, unaccounted for, are destroyed, and cold creams are rubbed into the soreness of thighs. There is nothing left over for a museum, no artifacts and no history, because the city lacks a memory of itself. It is a zone of amnesia.

Transportation

All citizens lope in the city of wolfmen. If a man is on bicycle when he transforms, he discards it, and if a man is within his automobile, he abandons it. The only movement is the movement of paw over earth. For this reason the city appears congested with traffic jams, though these are only streets of empty vehicles. In navigating the main roads, packs of wolfmen will run over car and bus roofs as over a frozen river. Sometimes a wolfman, still in his automobile, will find it difficult to unbuckle himself, and on hearing the thud of his brothers overhead, he will whimper helplessly and claw at his seatbelt, unable to join them: this is the limit of sadness in the city of wolfmen.

Language

In the city of wolfmen all speech requires response. Howl from field is answered by howl from forest, which is answered by howl from lakebed, such that howl necessarily begets howl and dialogues are like great stretches of echoes. The law of communication is that to hear is to speak, and to speak is to pass the burden of speaking to whoever has heard you, as in a room of men who have been given the word hello. Some nights it even seems as though there are not multiple howls but only one howl, which passes from throat to throat, leaving one and burrowing in another, like a locust.

Dining

The morning after, a man will wake up with blood and its iron taste in his mouth. He will gargle with water until it is gone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.