Innovative Fiction by
Gabriel Toupin
August, 5 PM
K whispers to us that once he stops breathing to scoop out his eyes and fill his sockets with Queen Anne’s Lace. J peels an orange by running her nail along the rind, juice weeps down her hands, smearing the dirt. G is lobotomizing a butterfly. D asserts that she was Botticelli and a damp cigarette and a missed call in her past lives. H grew a punctured lung and violet string that isn’t there. We continue peeling, pressing, prodding, and pissing our way deeper into an overdose but my morphology starts dripping along the side of some very cold iron. Y begins listing off every possible verb that could make somebody feel thirsty. U bruises a salty white hipbone with a throat full of cosmic blue silk. O is being molested by soliloquies. M is sewing rocks into a soft belly nobody could ever relate to. V pokes a very beautiful word she can’t think of into her skin. A crushed beer can and an optimistic future and the dust from a dirt road on mint leaves. Iced lemonade and a high school football star and a wasp nest. A spurt of semen. T divulges that he’s conquered God and put him in a mason jar but we’re not allowed to tell the leaves these things. Q tripped over an abstraction and broke his teeth. Beauty blisters covered in honey and a profound desire to unpreserve all that hasn’t been precious to me. R weaves roses through his broken spine and admits to having shoplifted glue to huff. Hot heroin and morning breath. I can’t help but feel a devastating need to express the feelings in my stomach.
The sky ruptures, choking on its own creation.
Gabriel Toupin lives in Detroit, Michigan where he is currently a full time student at Macomb Community College. He intends to pursue degrees in Linguistic and Cultural Anthropology at Michigan State University. He has no previously published work.
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August, 5 PM by Gabriel Toupin
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I like this piece. It is very moving and aloof at the same time.