Sebastian Malloy – Page 2

Zombie Chickens and Poultrygeists

Rivi and I are sitting on the porch at Boone and Tina’s new house, where they have given Rivi a temporary (or permanent, because who can really say) room in which to live. I have been over helping them to unpack, which has mainly consisted of carrying boxes up a...

Timothy Hutton Popsicles

What’s the temperature, Kenneth? Rivi texts me. 12 degrees right now, I text back. With a wind chill of -11. Her typing indicator winks an ellipses at me for what feels like thirty seconds, then pauses, then goes again for another thirty. Finally, her message pops up on the screen: Fuck....

Perpetual Drama Machine

“The power’s out,” Rivi says, on the other end of the phone line. “My madness is beginning to set in.” “Your madness set in years ago,” I say. “That ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, sunk, and was swallowed by a sea monster way before today.” “Don’t make fun of...

Panic Buying

My phone buzzes with a call while Hunter and I are in Grossett’s General Store, grabbing cheese sticks and pizza slices. I pull it out of my pocket and see that it’s Tina, in another time zone from us, three hours behind. “Hey,” I say, answering the call. “How’s tricks...

Cinnamon

There is a letter from Viola in the mailbox this morning, amongst the junk and the bills. It is too cold outside to read it at the top of the driveway, so I wait until I am settled in near the pellet stove. Dear Sebastian, I picked up Boone and...

Curated From the Dusty Archives

Twenty Year Storm

The rain is pouring outside, Biblical and a little unsettling. It pounds against the window of Viola’s attic, and the window rattles in its frame against the wind that whips down from the atmospheric river currently pummeling the west coast. “Well,” Viola says. “Guess we aren’t going out on the...

Ghost From the Archives

Headphone Girl

“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...

Ghost From the Archives

A Dead Man’s Gum

“So,” Viola says. “You know those carnival rides with the swings? The ones that spin and spin and raise up, and you’re going forty miles an hour in a stomach-churning circle that’s supposed to be fun, but really just make you want to vomit on everyone that’s standing down on...

Ghost From the Archives

The Immediate Past

Rivi, Destroyer of Worlds

“You should really do something with all this art, Sebastian,” Rivi says. “There’s so much of it.” She has been flipping through my virtual portfolio on my laptop, without asking permission first, of course. She’s more of an “act first, apologize never” sort of person, really. “I am doing something with it,” I say. “I’m keeping it on a hard drive and letting it age gracefully.” She grabs a throw pillow off the couch and does exactly that with it: throws it at me. “Don’t be a dip,” she says. “Do something with it. Put it on your blog.” “I…

A Feral Princess

Close-up of a tarnished doorknob set in a door covered in peeling paint, and bits of rusted metal. It is an old and weathered door.

I am supposed to not know that Rivi, Boone, and Tina are coming to pay us a visit in our house in the woods, and so when I open the front door to them after they knock and the dog barks the arrival of someone at the porch, I make sure that I am wearing my most authentic surprised face. “That’s a bullshit look if I ever saw one,” Rivi says. “Somebody told you we were coming.” “Shut up and hug me,” I say, wrapping her in an embrace. “It’s still bullshit,” she says. “It was Tina, wasn’t it? Boone…

Surprises

Several teardrop-shaped lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. More bulbs are in the background, out of focus.

Our power flickers at the same time my phone rings. I choose not to see it as some sort of omen. Out here in the woods, the first thoughts tend to lean in that direction, and it takes effort to steer the brain back to rationality. “Tina,” I say into my phone. “Bastian,” Tina replies. “How’s the Grizzly Adams life going?” “Well, there’s a severe lack of grizzlies around these parts. I’ve heard rumors of a black bear in the neighborhood, but I have yet to be presented with any evidence, so the jury is still out on that one.”…

Sugar Kisses

Extreme close-up of stacked cubes of sugar, under low key lighting

My phone rings while I am out across the property, shoveling pathways in the snow through the chicken run. The chickens do not enjoy walking through snow, and will all just stand inside the doorway to their coop for the entire day if they don’t have a trail dug for them to follow. I suppose if my feet were a half an inch thick, I wouldn’t want to be walking through a foot and a half of snow, either. I pull off one of my gloves and take my phone out of my pocket. “Rivi,” I say when I answer…

A Flock of Dinosaurs

Portrait of a gray rooster with bright red comb, against a blurred green background.

The low this morning is 14 degrees. With the wind factored in, it’s a chilly 4 degrees outside when I bundle up and go to care for the chickens at the far south end of our property. We’ve had at least a foot and a half of snow in the past few days, so it’s safe to say that the morning is exciting. I admit to making the chickens wait until after I’ve had coffee. Being out in sub-freezing temperatures without caffeine is just too awful to even consider. When we bought this property, it came with a small horse…

Old School

Dear Rivi: I have been thinking a lot recently about how much more enjoyable the Internet was back in the old days. I know, I know: hardly an original observation. Still, it’s been very much on my mind. Remember when it took five minutes to download a photo? On dial-up? Remember when there wasn’t any streaming music, let alone streaming video? Remember when the way people communicated was generally all text-based, either in chat rooms or BBSs? I’m telling you, Rivi, we didn’t know how good we had it. So that brings me to where my head is at today.…

Election Night, Anxiety Night

Dear Rivi: And here we are again, teetering on the edge, like we did in 2020, and in 2016, and I’ll tell you something: I am over all of this bullshit. How dare Americans be so shitty. So racist. So fascist. It’s both sickening and disheartening, while at the same time being this really pointed reminder that people have to fight for progress every goddamn time, or risk sliding back into the dark ages. And yes, I know that it’s not all Americans who are shitty, but it’s honestly far too many of them that are, and it turns my…

Every Cat’s Got a Bit of an Asshole in Him

A large orange cat sitting in the open window of a house

The library in Winchester is open four days a week, and today is one of those days. We have come to escape the heat, and because we haven’t had the chance to visit the library yet, which is a crime in a civilized world. The building is small, no larger really than a fast food restaurant along the highway, but it’s got a charm that is unmistakable. It’s brick, for one thing, which makes it stand out in a town of mostly wooden buildings, and there’s an old cannon out front, pointed at the weed shop across the street (there…