Hierarchy Of Nonsense

“My dad would take me to the beach every Sunday to build sandcastles,” Orion says, puffing on the bowl of ramen in front of him, the broth simmering hot at the touch of his breath. He looks up at June, blocking out the Sun with his left hand, and wrapping the right hand around his neck in a fold inspired by winter scarves. “It sounds silly, but I really enjoyed how sand felt on my skin. I loved playing with the shadows, building complex tunnels through them.” “Now I know you

While according to several city guidelines, June’s neighborhood does legally classify as a ‘residential zone’, anyone daring to venture into its vicinity would agree that this neighborhood is technically a flat, humid swamp where the plastered edges of crudely designed buildings stick out like sore spots. It seems to June that a few draggled architects over the last few years had flanked a cauldron bowl of inch tapes and compasses, chanted vivaciously around it in their fancy

June feels warm, her ears red and incandescent, her palms on the verge of blistering with an impatient innate desire to touch and be touched, to trace the vivid, blue veins popping under the pale contrast of his right chin, to have her fingers pursue the rough edges of his palm, to know why they are roughened, to know every little secret he has to offer and to whisper her own back to him. She wants his head to rest against hers, while she runs her fingers through his brown ha

Leaning against a glowing billboard at the subway station after work on a Wednesday evening, June pulls out her notebook and scratches the tip of her pen against the rustic-brown pages of her leather journal. She writes about the sandwich she ate at her work today – Mediterranean, cheese-less, slightly sour on the tongue, and the wrong amount of dry. She writes about how she was up before dawn, before the Sun embossed its thin slits into a wavering pattern on her curtains, le

“What do you think about recycling?” Ben asked, inching dangerously close to June’s face, prompting her to lean away in the opposite direction, away from Ben’s scraggy beard and the crustacean crumbs still lurking in them from the calamari he’d attempted to share with her earlier, only to have hogged down the entirety of the plate before she finished her first piece. She wonders whether a better use of her unfinished wine would be to rinse away her date’s beard and perhaps ev

June Pal wears black and smells of bitter almonds on the day she is to Erase a man’s memory for the first time. She tiptoes across the grassy, green fields on the slow, sunny afternoon, careful not to let the pollen cling to the ends of her oversized black jeans. Her posture is slightly skewed to the right, almost drooping, under the weight of a heavy rucksack that has only a sloppy sandwich and an unnecessarily large tablet. Her fingers are intertwined, fidgeting with rings