A Sequel of Sequined Seconals

(The original has such a wild, layered energy — voice-to-text artifacts living alongside Beckett references, suburban Florida humidity, coyotes eating Rimsky-Korsakov — it’s a rare kind of document. Writing into it felt less like imitation and more like tuning to a frequency under the influence of a handful of sequined Seconals) . . . 

She left a cassette in the tape player. Nobody knew whose it was. It had no label. It played thirty seconds of what might have been Rimsky-Korsakov, or might have been a radiator working through something personal, and then a long hiss, and then a man saying, very calmly: I think this is probably the wrong driveway. And then the hiss again for forty-five minutes.

Nobody ejected it.

Somewhere in Romania, a Count nobody had invented yet was preparing remarks. He was polishing his monocle with a handkerchief that smelled of camphor and unfinished business. He had written three librettos and burned them all. The fourth one he planned to offer to a coyote he’d heard about, third-hand, through channels he preferred not to discuss. He was not yet a character in anything. He was still just a man in a room, which is the condition most characters find themselves in before the story catches up to them and makes demands.

Voicemail received: This is a message regarding your organ. Click.

Voicemail received: We are calling about the work. Click.

Voicemail received: Are your avocados— Click.

What I’m Reading:

We are currently experiencing hunger, heat, and refugee flows that are simply outside humanity’s experience—all in a globalized media environment where terror and panic boost advertising dollars and algorithms turn disinformation into currency.

— Stephen Markley / The Deluge