Gnostic Welding Arc and Vitamins
By Brian Barbeito


The light went inside the place from the openings, and the tall bushes were all overgrown, - but still reaching up and up. They always stayed there in the night- the bushes, and before that in the dusk- they watched the bats- sometimes one, sometimes two, and rarely three- come overhead. If the sky was a reddish hue then, it seemed like someone should say something, or take a photograph, or even write something. But nobody ever did. People were used to the world. It was not that it was a great sky- but it and the tall shrubs held their own type of allure- and were somehow also a warning- not a portent of doom, but just a nature note that the day was over and you were entering something else now. Take a little caution, like you take a little pill. A vitamin- not a narcotic. But you better take it nevertheless. Later in the night it became easier and harder. Easier because there was room to think- the hustle of the century- the automobile, the rampant business- calmed down- and since it was a bedroom town originally- it went back to its own roots a bit. It had not come completely cut off, unhinged as it were, from the good and sustaining earth. Sometimes then, wind came, down the walls, and playing with the shrubs, or across the little makeshift valleys and into radio bedrooms, and you could almost think it was some idealized day of old. It was harder though- because there were no distractions- no surety of the schedule of bright and dawn, or the taken for granted light and bright calendar day. Thoughts of the one that was there with dark eyes and some knowing grin. Sweet and sinister at once- sometimes naive, sometimes cunning. She was good, and they had been on a powerful and upwards arc- the chemistry had it as such- like the arc from a welding torch- only it was invisible- with a quiet power. That was what they had been together- Gnostic. But the torch was let go, and that receded like most all times recede. Now only the abstract remnants of what they were remained. But the bushes, and the light that creeps in, and how the wild unabridged flowers push against old windows- and the odd bat against the beet sky, a bat like the one he had caught glimpse of as a child once while walking with his uncle. They moved quickly. Like little tiny lightning bolts that changed directions, or like they were on strings and someone hidden could adjust and pull these threads at incredibly fast movements. Soon night would envelope everything and he would have to take some kind of vitamin for the good but difficult spacious ache of its environs.


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Brian Michael Barbeito writes impressionistic vignettes, flash fiction, short stories, prose poetry, experimental novels, book and film reviews. His work has appeared at Glossolalia, Subtle Fiction, Mudjob, Six Sentences, Thinking Ten, American Chronicle, Our Echo, Ezine Authors, Author Nation, A Million Stores, Crimson Highway, Paragraph Planet, Useless-Knowledge Magazine, Exclusive Conclave of Delights Magazine, and Lunatics Folly. His work is forthcoming in the Contemporary Literary Horizons Journal, and in Kurungabaa Magazine. He is the author of ‘postprandial,’ an experimental novel, and a compilation of his work, ‘Vignettes,’ is being compiled. Brian resides in Ontario, Canada