Rodrigo Duran
They were boiling their clothes.
They were in the kitchen wearing raincoats, but the true outfits swirled in a bubbling broth in the pot itself. Every so often they looked inside, but met by the tremendous smell, they put the lid back on, only glimpsing a loose sleeve waving back from inside the brown liquid.
They stared at their hairy legs, at the white frilled sandals, ten beautiful toes each.
They shared a glass of orange juice, one glass with hollow ice inside of it.
And when one of them would let their mind wander, would look around the cabin, out at the black tree skeletons, out the window, or the dirty ceramics in the sink, the statue of a screaming man, which they had one night beaten with a baseball bat and which now sat in a pile on the kitchen table, mistaking its white dust of plaster with toasted brown bread crumbs, discarded grains of rice, dead bugs in a lonely train, next to a still ripe tomato, though not for long, the sky which is always changing color, the corner of the living room where the ragged armchair sat, frayed fabric like hair on the top, the other would say, “What are you looking at?”
And then they would say, “nothing,” then looking at you, your nose sloped and crooked, your eyes blue and brown, your lips bitten and dry, your hair, your ears, your neck.
Rodrigo Duran grew up in Georgia. He is a Fiction candidate at the University of Wyoming MFA. His work has appeared in The Florida Review’s Aquifer and Tiny Molecules. Occasionally he tweets @Robotoduran.
