Category: story

Lazur sits at the booth, the restaurant dim as always, black interior, cold morning light through half-drawn curtains. He wears blue jeans and a green field jacket and worn-out combat boots, black stripping to gray.

The only reason he knows about this place is because as a child he was taken in search of what was supposedly his dad’s favorite restaurant. They drove for hours looking for it as his dad explained the virtues of this particular location, hinting that it would reunite them with something that had been taken from them, imparted by proximity to an authentic mode of production, something honest and true pertaining to manhood and culture. Lazur still isn’t sure if this is the restaurant, or another restaurant his dad settled on in lieu of the perfect, still-undiscovered ideal, in whose absence their masculine trajectories have suffered. When they ate here, his dad seemed vaguely subdued, which his child-self didn’t think much of, but decades later he tried to decode the cloud of adult emotion in retrospect. Perhaps it was the restaurant, but it wasn’t as good as his dad remembered. Perhaps it would have been better never to find it at all.

A photo floats on the ashy water, charred along the white edges. Lazur picks it up and it drips as if fished from a tray of developer fluid.

In the camera flash, the 5000K explosion of a false sun, his naked body looks snuff-film obscene, his face vulnerable and agonized from the stick of dynamite inserted in his ass, invisible except for the way his knees are thrust forward, chest arched, legs spread.
The boy next to him smiles, the half-boy, shattered boy, buried teeth glowing in the burst of light, jawbone strewn like a constellation through blasted flesh.
Their eyes are red from the flash bouncing off the blood in their retinas. They look like demons set apart from the rest of humanity. Demons of the bomb.