FACTS OF COMBAT: if your head was blown off I would still know you from the birthmark in the shape of your own shadow, on your left handHEATHER BELL
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FLASH FICTIONY PROSE POEMY THINGS
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JANUARY 2009
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4.00
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excerpts from FACTS OF COMBAT:
"Yesterday, I ordered a snuff film online. The room smells like directionless things or the scars across a woman's cervix. In six to eight weeks, I hope to see a girl in ropes or a boy in ropes get shot in the head. The point from alive to dead, where is it? I hope to see the air turn sensuous when everyone dies and I pretend to die and am falling and falling and the branches and trees have pools and hollows, and in each hole there is a place to put something important to you. You touch the lines of my face and call me your peeping tom and laugh at this joke."
"Aunt Marjorie, I think I love her, as she takes me behind the tub on wash day and washes my dirty violent parts. She says, don't tell anyone about this and cries and cries like she has no shame, or perhaps, too much of it. Aunt Marjorie's gut reminds me of fish and old maps and animal fur. She says, love is like this. Don't tell anyone. I am confused by this and angry at her bad armor. But I love Aunt Marjorie, the dark shallow water in her eyes, the scent of sycamore leaves in her old hair. I love Aunt Marjorie, mostly in the closet in my bedroom, where she says, don't tell anyone about this and I don't tell anyone about this, except once I told my mother, told her in the way you would talk about new green soap or the toes in your sandals."
from J.A. TYLER:
"HEATHER BELL'S FACTS OF COMBAT is a collection of physical and emotional violence, a seething bit of writing. she composes from inside, where raw honesty huddles next to blood. this is a book of bruising and symphonies."
