the weblog of robin camille davis

She touched ice and was bruised. To watch she must pause, and so what she caught was never the truth — the woman panting, dancing, weeping — it was only the woman who paused. The mirror was always one breath too late to catch the breathing.
—Under a Glass Bell by Anaïs Nin, 1944
(Probably the best [...]

Where I was, one year ago. We were watching biplanes cross skies and disappear behind mountains. We were speaking in three languages. We were walking the paths of philosophers, shoulders burning.
As the world grows smaller, it seems I go farther… and return later, older, sadder. Sometimes I wonder why we keep moving around so much. [...]

I fancy myself a fairly well-seasoned traveler. (Not with salt & pepper.) Over the years I’ve figured out some tips & tricks that make my life easier when I’m leavin’ on jetplanes. These are some of them.

If you normally wear contacts, don’t wear them on the plane, as the air system will dry them out. [...]

This is the last fiction short of my Week of Flash Fiction. To those who read: kudos. To those who marked as read: whatever, man. Today’s is inspired by La Gamme Jaune by Frantisek Kupka, one of my favorite paintings.

     He dozed lightly, one finger curled into the middle of a collection of Baudelaire verse. The [...]

I wrote this about a year ago. It’s kind of a long one, but you’ve got seven minutes, haven’t you?

It’s cloudy today. The sky is a blank white, a modern art painting that disappears into the cold open ocean. Footprints dig everywhere into the sand, the legacies of last night’s revelers and of this morning’s [...]

Interlude: a nonfiction gchat conversation.
____________________________

10:01 PM Deven: so, think you could keep pace in a back-and-forth with birds?
me: it might be too hard for me to swallow
10:02 PM Deven: that one almost made me crow
10:03 PM me: there’s no thrush to get too serious here
Deven: well, you know what they say: titmouse for [...]

Written in the style of Thomas Bernhard.

He knew he had been invited not out of friendliness on the Berghemers’ part but as a point of interest, a half-line epithet used to lure people to their otherwise unbearable dinner party. He knew they would all be terrible bores themselves. Why did he come? he asked himself, [...]

Your head is aching. A screw is tightening and your skull is shrinking and someone has taken the liberty of sucking the extraneous fluid from your eyeballs so they feel like two hard black rocks, the eyes of a snowman. You are a snowman, a snowgirl. Your skin is flaky and cold and white like [...]