Sebastian – Page 3 – Sebastian Malloy

Archive by category "Sebastian" (Page 3)

Alain Delon and la Dépression Française

It’s snowing as Rivi and I walk along the path beside the creek. She has been staying with us for a week, and has spent most of the time in the guest room with the door shut. Hibernating, she calls it. Hiding, I tell her. Either way, I’m glad that she’s out today, if not exactly in public, at least out with me. We don’t speak as we walk, and the only sounds are the trickling of the water in the creek as it splashes over the rocks and our shoes on the gravel path. There is a silence that…

Salt Lake Matador

A matador with a red cape facing off against an angry bull

My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out and see that it’s a FaceTime call coming through: Rivi. I swipe to accept it. “Rivi,” I say. “Sebastian.” The image is dark except for a sliver of blue, enough to dimly illuminate the right side of Rivi’s face, and a bit of a wall behind her. “Where are you?” I ask. “Salt Lake,” she says. “Somewhere around there, I guess. Murder motel on the wrong side of the tracks. Actually, all of it’s on the wrong side of the tracks here.” “What are you doing in Salt Lake? And…

Headphone Girl

Black headphones against a dark background

“I’m setting fire to my Twitter,” Viola says. “It’s too much of a fucking mess. That whole place is imploding so hard that it’s going to suck into itself and black hole the entire thing into another dimension.” We are sitting on the roof of her house, just outside her attic window, in a place most people would consider dangerous. We are not most people. It’s cold out, and gray, and an icy wind is blowing, but there is still a plague going on, even if most of the world is pretending that there isn’t. Up here, we can take…

Rocket Man

A Chess Game of Cards

I am meeting Suzi at the Palace of Fine Arts, beneath the giant dome on the edge of the pond. The crowd is much larger than I’d been expecting, a thick herd of people milling about, blocking my way, nearly tripping over one another as they walk the grounds. I’d forgotten it is Memorial Day weekend, which explains why I’d had to park in Timbuktu and walk a million miles to get here. My phone buzzes, and I see that it’s Suzi calling me. “Hello,” I say, answering it. “Hi,” she says. “I’m here. I have no idea where…

Perpetual Smug

“In my dream,” Rivi says, “I’m standing outside a blue house at the top of a big hill. There’s a black cat in the yard, and I try to walk around it to look at its face, but no matter where I’m standing, it’s always looking away from me.” We are laying in her bed, with dozens of photographs spread out around us. She has been looking through photo boxes, pulling out some, transferring others from one box to another. I have seen myself in many of them, and more full of faces I don’t know. “I can see my…

Cultural Archaeology

Rivi and I are waiting for the BART to arrive. The low hum of distant trains hovers in the air of the underground station like the thrum of surf against the shore. Rivi pokes at the back of my neck with her fingernail. “You got sunburned,” she says. “Is it bad?” I ask. “Not really. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it’s bad, sure. Sunburn is just one step away from skin cancer.” She pokes me again. “Okay,” I say. “Is it cancer?” “Nah,” she says. “It’s just a sunburn.” We had spent the afternoon at Amoeba in…

Typhoid Magpie

From her bedroom, Rivi brings me a copy of a used book she’s picked up earlier in the day: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. “I found it at Green Apple,” she says. “It was mis-shelved in the poetry section.” I turn the book over and look at the back cover. “I think I’ve read this,” I say. “It sounds familiar.” “Doesn’t matter,” she says. She takes the book back from me and flips through the pages. Mid-way through, she stops, and I see that there’s something stuck between the pages of the book. It’s a photograph,…

The Secret Architectures of Spiders

Hannah is sucking on a Blow Pop as we drive. She is scrolling through my iPhone, looking at my music. “Don’t you have anything from this century in here?” she asks. “Don’t give me any grief,” I say. “You’re the same age I am.” “Maybe, but my musical education didn’t stop in 1987.” She finally picks something, and The Boomtown Rats start playing from the car speakers. “I do listen to new music, you know,” I say. “It’s just new music that sounds like old music.” The road is all curves here, in the hills along the California and Nevada…

At the Edge of the Continent

“I should take a trip,” Hannah is saying. “Someplace far away. Darjeeling, maybe. Someplace where the air is spicy.” We are walking outside the zoo, and the air is not spicy here. It smells of eucalyptus and salt air. “I want to be in one of those hotels that you see in the movies,” she continues. “Old wood on the walls and a balcony overlooking a marketplace.” “How about Fresno?” I ask. “Fresno is exotic.” “Fresno is an armpit,” she says. “Don’t be a putz.” She has work this morning, and so we are here walking in the dawn, the…