Calendar of Regrets

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The author would like to thank the publishers of the following journals and anthologies, in which some of these chapters first appeared in slightly different form: Best New Writing 2007, Black Warrior Review, Brooklyn Rail, Closets of Time, Gargoyle, Detroit: Stories, Iowa Review, Perigee, Serving House, Weber Studies, Writers' Dojo.

Collage/text chapters and photographs created and manipulated by Andi and Lance Olsen.

Hieronymus Bosch dabs paintbrush to palette and confers with the small round convex mirror floating alone in an ocean of bonewhite wall on the far side of his studio. Sharpness of eye, thinness of lip, satirical rage, he thinks: his whole family of attributes, God willing, will be out of this mess soon enough. Rotating back to his work at hand, he touches color flecks to the insectile legs rooted in the dwarf's shoulder. Appraises.

Travel is sport for those who lack imagination. Bosch is sure of it. Take, by way of illustration, that huge hideous Groot. That huge hideous Groot does not possess a nose. He possesses a greasy vein-webbed tumor partitioning two puckered purple assholes. A homuncular likeness of him hunches in the dark sky above the rendered Bosch's raised left hand. Groot appears piggish as a gluttonous priest, ears donkey-large with gossip. The heavens churn with hell smoke. Below, the hilly countryside blazes with the firewind of belief.

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