There was a man made of strings and every time he walked by someone man, woman, child, or elder a string came out of him but cut another, the other on the opposing end of the string would suddenly drop dead without reason, without sound, a silent and absurd sump into the earth ‘no strings attached,’ they say. Now, the man went about his life not knowing this fact, and, as a matter of it he was a wanderer too, a traveler of sorts passing people here and there, eventually his travels would amount to everywhere eyes like a modern Lazarus born long ago in the desert of fertility, or the frozen Eden the city beneath the sea, the stranger from the sky, invisible strings latching onto all he passed by, one by one until one day, an old string got close a traveler who followed him in recent years a girl, now woman, caught in his latest spindle the wires before her cut one by one leading back to her, the daring woman who sought the man made of strings and it was in a café, by an airfield in Germany, overlooking a river where she caught up with him telling him all he had done over the years, from the stories of the wanderer, to the songs of those who met their demise all the way to her, the girl whose eyes he met in the metro, the girl whose home was the subway, ten years ago now she, the next string to be cut. Now, the man, unworried by this knowledge sees a plane coming to land, he feels the pilot’s eyes meet his own; the woman’s sight behind him fades out; her story goes limp, inertia failing to keep her up: gravity upon the café table, the man made of strings, empty-handed, stands, his blind eyes spindling fortunes with deaf ears a dry open mouth; salt on the tongue like hot sand grated onto glass.
Bartender. Hit me with another!
in paradiso, ego sum