When the Ceviche Was Off It wasn't lit as sparsely as you think. The moon's hernia not as painful as it lurched like Quasimodo through the poplars on the horizon line. Inside, the restaurant did not heave collective collapses in expectation. The pallor of the waitstaff's manner, as they passed the heaping legions back to be scraped and washed, not as sickly, not as sullen. I'll allow that the patrons' weary faces showed disappointment and disillusionment, but showed it to a lesser degree than what you describe in this account. The ceviche, it is true, was not up to, didn't even vaguely approach, "snuff." Not by the house standards. But the proverbial band played on. And Graciella, full of both resource and savage need, did indeed take to the bagpipes for whatever cumshaw she could scrape, assaulting them with "squalor and misuse," as you have written. Yet here you overstate, miss a generous target. In the music, in its pining heart, you can hear the renaissance of ceviche from its dungeon of ash, hear how it regains its manic composure. Soon it will flit by the eyes of the many-sided moon.
Sonar When the back door opened the jazz hit the night, too. It meshed with the frozen spit upon the careless masonry. The black air alkaline crushed by fish machines, the way a pugilist’s bandages are taped during a bout, the way a carpenter stomps among cast-off boards and trash. Sawdust sticks bitterly to the tongue. Down at the wharf shops, the jazz, now more distant, was sonar garrulous and thudding. A smiling man sat paring a mango with his back to the sea. A vicious woman was pouring waste from an alley window. A colossal octopus with brain damage had written eight poems on university letterhead. He watched in wonder as they flapped and flitted like confetti from the swaying dock.