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Archive VIII – Apr-Nov 2024
Archive VII – Jan-Apr 2024
Archive VI – Sept-Dec 2023
Archive V – Apr-Sept 2023
Archive IV – Jan-Apr 2023
Archive III – Oct-Dec 2022
Archive II – Aug-Oct 2022
Archive I – Jul-Aug 2022
Toby got up and spoke.
He told how Sal knew every grift in the book and one time won a bet at a barrel house that cost the other guy a finger. Bumleg Bry and Nickles chuckled. Kent finished the cairn.
No shovel to dig a hole.
Nothing sadder than a hobo funeral.#vss365 #grift
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) August 27, 2022
The alien ship had landed over eighty years ago. Not a sound, not a movement, in all that time.
The diaphanous shell covering it made it immovable and bullet proof.
And so it stood there for generations, a constant, silent reminder that we are not alone.#vss365 #diaphanous
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) August 22, 2022
The dive bar smelled funny and the park was dirty; the café, overpriced. The places they had shared had changed without changing.
Ben’s hiraeth to that time and place when they were young, struggling and in love had brought him here.
He wished he hadn’t come.#vss365 #hiraeth
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) August 19, 2022
She found her catharsis in her art, sculpting incredibly lifelike human forms in Papier-mâché. People flocked to her temporary pop-ups all over the city.
The sleeping pills she fed her subjects meant they didn’t even feel the slow suffocation of the plaster.#vss365 #catharsis
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) August 18, 2022
I watched the VHS of Nan and Grandad so often the tape was never in its sleeve.
I paused on them laughing at the beach once for so long it caused an image burn on the screen. Nan’s smile, from somewhere beyond here, always there.
I hated when we got the new TV.#vss365 #burn
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) August 10, 2022
He kept spare dimes in his pocket and fed any expired parking metre he passed on his morning walk. He got a ticket for it once. “You can’t do that,” the cop said.
Word spread and the neighbours rallied and paid the $65 fine for him at the station. All in dimes.#vss365 #meter
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) August 9, 2022
He was eristic, always had been. Facts were transient, conversations went in ovals, which is to say they went in circles but elongated when it was his turn to speak.
When nobody came to his birthday party he chalked it up to the weather and ate all the cake.#vss365 #transient
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) August 7, 2022
On nights like this when sleep runs from me, I sit on the balcony and watch the quiet city street below. A skunk rambles by; the stoplights continue to change, unaware they are not needed.
A quiet, peaceful solitude in a place usually thrumming.#vss365 #solitude #4AMThoughts
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) August 6, 2022
“How do I know that’s really her?” Simon asked, pointing at the silhouette in the third floor window.
“Trust me.”
He’d been fooled before. Remembering the man who had turned out to be two otters and an anteater in a trenchcoat, he proceeded with caution.#vss365 #silhouette
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) August 3, 2022
There was no tunnel; no light beckoning me towards it. No golden escalator or pearly gates.
I remember the truck, the blackness, and now there was only this short, dim hallway with two doors at the end, both marked with an H.
The choice, apparently, was mine.#vss365 #hallway
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) August 2, 2022
To my old man, everything was a racket; the electricity company, cable television, ballplayers. He’d rail at the world over half-folded newspaper and unfinished toast.
He was loud about it all, but only ever at our kitchen table. Anywhere else, he was quiet.#vss365 #racket
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) July 26, 2022
“It’s called the ‘fine’ fine,” she says, very happy with her cleverness. “It’s like a swear jar but it’s for every time you tell me you’re fine when you’re really not.”
“Do I really do that so often?”
Her face softens and she hugs me tightly.
“You do,” she says.#vss365 #fine
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) July 19, 2022
The smell; clean, but not, as if someone had tried very hard to scrub up something foul but had missed a spot.
The beeping; incessant, until it wasn’t.
Flowers and cards gone.
This was now someone else’s room.
I held my sister’s hand.
She was the #materfamilias now.#vss365
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) July 15, 2022
She was too young to understand the complexities of polyandry, but her innocence painted the ideal quite nicely.
Her Barbie had no issues with both Ken and G.I. Joe living in her dream house. There were tea parties with lively conversation and lots of hugs.#vss365 #polyandry
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) July 14, 2022
“Iocaine powder, I bet my life on it.”
“It’s just sugar, dad, for your coffee.”
Marta rubbed her eyes and buttered her toast. She loved that her dad had come to live with them but he was always on.
“Can we not with the movie quotes please?”
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) July 12, 2022
I’ll take your acid words, meant to burn me and melt me into a gelatinous state that you skim up off the floor and discard in the bin alongside anyone who ever gave a damn about you, and I’ll place them in that polymethylpentene part of my heart and forgive you.#vss365 #acid
— Lee Zanello (@_LimaZulu) July 11, 2022