Las Vegas for Vegans by A. S. Patric Read Free Book Online Page A

when she was seventeen, until she destroyed her knee. She was a whore for three years in her early twenties (but she has told me about neither of these things). I’ve found a picture that was taken of her dancing—from a full-scale ballet.

MINERVA BLUES
    Minerva looks exactly like a fly these days. That’s what happens when no-one prays to you—diminishment and disgrace. Even so (and it’s certainly a credit to her former dignity and prestige), the goddess does not drone or buzz as she flies through my window. She whistles a tune called ‘Emily Dickinson Blues’, and I hum along for a few bars, before I swat her into a splotch of ink-black insect afterlife.
    You can’t kill divinities as easily as this, I know, but there is a brief moment in which I feel Olympian. I lean forward and peer into the entrails of the dead fly and the cosmos reveals its secrets. And yes, everything is very, very clear, but I have already forgotten the lovely tune Minerva was whistling only a few moments ago.
    I have spent years trying to recall how it goes, and live with my windows wide open—even at the height of summer. Mosquitoes of Mesoamerican lineage leave a Braille of bites across my flesh but I cannot read Aztec or Inca. All I know is that they were once high priests who had surgical tastes for the human heart.
    I gather with these late-night whisperers of blood hunger, out by a street light that never sees any traffic. I suppose it has been put here for people like me, wandering around half-naked, on overly hot evenings. A moth flutters down from the yellow plastic illumination and tells me it used to visit the moon when its best friend was Mercury. Now we can’t hear the stars and we can barely even see the constellations. I let the moth rest on my shoulder. Later, it tells me about the many ways civilisations reach their natural ends.
    I shoo the moth away and know that I will soon forget. My memories are too many and so they turn themselves into fireflies. They drift away in a mass—resembling the cosmos swirling into the opposite of infinity. I should have found a jar and filled it with these lights (kept a few recollections), but it’s too late.
    The street light casts a low yellow glow, yet now there’s nothing else. I cling to the pole and listen to a joke the hungry mosquitoes tell about how the only difference between Ovid and Michael Jackson was the glittery glove. They tell this joke again and again and again. Eternal repetition is a favourite punishment in our part of the underworld.

THE INTERIOR
    A few raindrops spray across the windscreen, but it’s not quite raining. I open my door and step outside. Port Phillip Bay is very near and the wind off the water races over the bitumen of the car park, gusting a chill upwards.
    She sits within the interior warmth of her car. She’s on her mobile, talking, and smiles at me. We have been friends for so many years, the world has changed popes, presidents and prime ministers. We remember the last days of revolution and together we watched global warfare gathering on the horizon— catastrophic storms imminent for over a decade. The oceans were full of fish and everything seemed limitless and possible. We saw babies born and talked about first words and steps and consulted each other on how to impart the knowledge of death, so it wouldn’t be bitter or fearful. We watched movies with film stars now dead or grown old and living in obscurity somewhere in the hills of California. There was music and bands in bars—and there were mistakes we made that we daydreamed about with hangovers for hours afterwards some Sunday mornings. There were books we forced upon each other because they would change our hearts and minds in integral, utterly necessary ways. She is looking at me with our histories written on the same pages, sitting in her driver’s seat with her seatbelt still on, talking into her phone, and smiling at me