Fanfarlo – Harold T. Wilkins or How To Wait For A Very Long Time
The Wilkins kid was weird. He would spend his evenings reading these dusty paperbacks he’d found in his grandmother’s attic and drawing pictures of Ra melting in a microwave made of wood. He wouldn’t speak with the neighbor’s kids and if they did cross paths he would yell shrinking heads, shrinking heads! at them until they ran away, sobbing.
[Buy Reservoir.]
bzzzzrp. program loading – 1%. beep. beep beep. 17%. whrrrrrrrrrrrrrring. 56%. initialising thought matrix. copying emotional database. 72%. installing How_To_Love.php. saving back-up to hard disk. 99%… 100%.
“Welcome to Earth, android. We hazard a guess that this is your first time. Don’t be alarmed. The pink-fleshed bipeds strolling along the ground are mostly harmless and stupid, though be aware that their stupidity can sometimes lead to grave acts of violence. But they are mostly searching for love and affection. This is why you are here. You will love better than any before. You will care for your Other Half with the utmost compassion and respect, even if that means running out to the corner store in the early hours of the morning in only your bedwear to buy a loaf of bread for breakfast. You have all the tools necessary. All programs have been installed successfully. Good luck.”
[Buy Relayted.]
When you’re down down down get up up up in the clouds. [Buy.]
(photo by Chenie)
In the sweltering mid-afternoon Jerome caught the wind. In his arms, he held two buckets of water. The heat had been beating down on his boil-ridden back for hours as he walked from the well back to the village where his family – his father, mother, and two sisters – were waiting, parched. He resisted the impulse to wash his dusty skin clean. He declined to take even a sip. He walked on. And the heat was terrible, this aching drone on his pores that wouldn’t stop, like a horde of bees in a windowless room. And when the sun had swung highest, sitting perched atop the sky in the midday hour, he had felt closer than ever before to stopping. But the wind had come, just a gentle breeze, and relieved his tired eyes of dust and swept away the dirt from his leathery arms and aroused a soft smile.
The Galápagos Islands, littered with Endemics, lying to keep themselves alive. Corinne, a Cormorant, is adamant. “We’re not devolved. We’re just content. We don’t need to travel the world, breed with other species, grow strange limbs, spotted coats, and speak in strange tongues. I don’t even like traveling, anyway. I like it here. The sun sets and rises in the same skies and the seas are blue.” By her side, a leather-skinned tortoise celebrating another fistful of decades makes the second of its bi-annual migration to the mossy rocks across the inlet. “You see, you’re always changing. You don’t give yourself any chances. You’ll learn sometime that sticking around isn’t a terrible thing.”
[Buy Neptunes.]
(illustration by Justine L. Hirten)
The Fossil Collective – On & On
Jeffers drove trucks for a movers group. Mostly musical instruments. Gibsons in cases clattering, piano keys twinkling, oboes, xylophones, rows and rows of triangles cluttered together rumbling down the highway. His favorite song was Ray’s “Hit The Road, Jack” and he hummed the tune with one hand on the wheel, the other gripping stick. Don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more! Sometimes he’d whistle at girlies when he stopped for a coffee and a sandwich. Now and again they whistled back. Mostly they just laughed, waving sympathetically from their short shorts and crop tops.
[Buy the Honey Slides EP. Go here to watch the video – it’s incredible.]
Deep Blue Something – Breakfast At Tiffany’s
Watching that cab meter ticking ten cents on top of every dollar is enough to let you know your night wasn’t worth the fare. Eagerly asking “What was that?” when the driver is just talking into his hands-free headset is around that same sort of vibe. Dead skin and drooping eyes and not a lick of decent alcohol swirling in your system. And then this kind of song comes through the radio and you remember how the city used to be this incredible twist of lights and buildings and unexplored streets when you were a kid sitting in the backseat with your pops maneuvering along the dotted-line tar. [Buy 11th Song.]
(illustration by Céline Meisser)
Fleet Foxes – Heard Them Stirring
Peeling oranges on the countertop. Rubbing the soles of my feet against the kitchen tiles, feeling the stray crumbs and the sticky remnants of spilled apple juice from days earlier binding with the fleshy underside. Wearing a tattered bathrobe on top of some borrowed shorts that are both too big and too small. The morning is goosebump-ridden, tickling forearm hairs with its chill. The afternoon promises more of the same. Citric juices on my fingers. Forgetting about this. Rubbing my eyes. Feeling the burn. Open mouth and wide expression, waiting for the sting to settle. Something feels good. [Buy.]
(artwork by Tom Bennett)
