Month: May 2025

• Head Injury and Hot Dogs

  

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  A young girl fell out of a grocery cart in the meat department today. I was right there, looking at chicken when it happened. The rubbery thudding smack her head made against the polished floor was highly audible and excruciating. It rattled my guts. She immediately began to cry, and her mother went to her right away to check if she was okay. I was afraid to look because I didn’t want to see her skull cracked open, but I looked anyway. Her mother frantically parted the girl’s hair and searched her head for a bump, cut, bruise. It was hard to tell the extent of her injuries because the poor girl was wailing so much that her face was red and puffy and streaked with tears. The mother picked her up and held her. Damn, that must have hurt, I thought, and that’s when I noticed one of the meat department clerkies stocking hot dogs onto the shelves a little ways away. He kept looking over his shoulder at the young girl who fell out of the cart, and he was smiling, grinning, on the brink of laughter even.

  I was like, damn that is cold. The meat department clerk set the box of hot dogs aside and pulled out his cell phone. He held it up and I could tell he was videotaping the little girl blubbering away like a sad whale who had fallen off the edge of the Earth. The clerk put a hand over his face to hide his laughter. It isn’t funny, I thought. It was horrific. She could have been seriously hurt. What is wrong with people? Oh, yeah. Hate is love now.

  The mother and her traumatized daughter eventually sailed away to the produce department, the girl now sitting in the cart part, not the seat part. I wandered behind just to see if anything else was going to happen. I hoped she didn’t have to go to the hospital. How awful it would have been for a trip to the grocery store to turn into a day at the ER where they suffocate you with waiting and paperwork and questions about insurance. Profit over people. Great system. But the mother just gave the girl one of those free bananas to help make her feel better. I’d want something more than that. The girl peeled it and looked at it with tears still in her eyes. She bit into it and chewed through a big sigh. Damn. Life… You never know what’s going to happen next.

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August

• The Abandoned Mannequin

  

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  Our lives all tangled in a fishing net of anxiety. And then she’s lovely to hold. Warm wife. Oblong life. Woke up like lonely Hulk today, thumbing for a ride on the avenue of broken dreams, smashing through a brick wall in an abandoned town on the edge of the desert. Scattered bricks like broken red bones. Scattered sinew on sailing ships. My Hulk prophecy figure walks into an old diner and throws a coffee maker out a window. Fragile, time-tainted glass shatters. A bellow of life rage bursts forth from green lungs. To the bank, the vault. I rip off the door and step inside. I fill my torn pants with money. I fall to the floor. I’m beginning to transform back to a regular human being even though I will never be a normal human being. My eyes don’t look weird anymore; my hair doesn’t look stupid. I take all that money and buy some new clothes at the abandoned western store. A mannequin propped up behind the counter takes the cash. She has a rabid smile and a cracked eye. She says, “Thank you, have a nice day” in a warped, mechanical voice. There’s a vibe of cemetery creepiness.

  I take the stolen money to Vegas so I can gamble and drink and walk around in an altered state of consciousness. I feel weird and alone in that great sea of people. The skin, the fabric, the suntan lotion smell, the erratic behavior and noise. It’s like swimming in an ocean of strange beings from somewhere else. I sit comatose in front of a slot machine and watch the world spin. Bells suddenly start going off, lights flash. Winner! I take my ten million dollars up to the hotel room. Dim light, an A/C chill. I throw the money on the bed and dive into it. I swim in my dreams come true. Then there comes a knock on the door. I get up to answer. It’s the mannequin from the western store in that desert town. She looks at me with that cracked eye. “I followed you because I like you. You’re handsome and cool. I need more for my life than just standing behind that counter and dying of boredom.” Her eyes shift to the piles of money on the bed. “And you’re rich. I love that. Let’s go shopping.”

  People look at us because I am a man and she is a mannequin. Passersby take photos. I am taunted and teased. Grenadine, her name was Grenadine, defends me. She attacks people and rips out their hair. People scream and scatter. The police arrive and we’re both questioned, then arrested. The cops take all my money. I sit alone in a jail cell, an empty soul with destitute pockets. My dreams are shattered, and I blame it all on that damn Grenadine. I should never have answered the door. I should have leapt out the window with my life intact. Damn desert mannequin. Damn dreams and drugs. Errors are relentless, time is unforgiving.

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August

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  My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book and print editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.

• Broken

  

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  Broken window puffs off the path. The dander of anger shaken from the tree limbs of devastating life. What being am I? Where do I exist? The red clam-colored house in the woods. Ancient two-story architecture. Humble seeds scattered upon the portico. Hazy windows with shadows inside. A bandolier of broken trees, broken dreams, broken bones. Graveyard peace and quiet, the pink bricks scream for mercy, the tattered roof begs for a bandage. A glycerin sun glaze paints smears of gut swirling lamp light brutal beautiful memories. Hurt, like a leprechaun with a broken leg left in a golden field of war.

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August

• Starless

  

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  I am starless, spotless, as I lie out beneath this tattered universe ceiling thinking only of you… I hear your heartbeat beside me, how it rattles against my cage in the deepest dark of night to soothe me like a clock, where only dreams exist to escape, to wake to the sun and your beautiful blue-eyed face, your beautiful yawn at dawn, the place where the newest day greets me with everything you are, countless, too much to count, how love life lives with every sweet breath you take, with every single motion you make, with every tired whisper that aches out of your soul at morning’s break; you are endless beauty written on the walls, a gift with no ending, a memory worth waiting for.

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August

• Pink Floors

  

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  I want to go to dreamland and stay there. To live among the colored angels and broken glass voodoo kings. To be anything but this comatose soul. To be anything but a sleepy creepy doll in a kaleidoscopic straitjacket of the mind. Now autumn longing. The orange sun ablaze on the ground and in the trees. Walkways littered with colored leaves. Bowed head in red lamps corridor. Pink floors. A crowd in the distance. Keep them there, away from me. I want to be in the solitude chamber of the midnight mall. Today white-gray sky. Rain in the air. An ache in my guts. Lackadaisical opium fields stretch out to the horizon. Happiness taunts me.

  

  By

  Aaron Echoes August