When I jerk awake, it’s still dark, my wife deep asleep beside me. I have a terrible stiff neck, and I think I can detect a lingering smell of blood. I had just dreamed that I had been sentenced to death by decapitation for an unspecified crime. The next thing I knew, I was walking through a crowd very gingerly, trying to keep my head balanced on my neck stump. Only two or three people even bothered to scream out. The rest must have been practitioners of the new brutality, unaffected by the sight of blood, indifferent almost.

Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

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