[Editor’s Note: This week’s horoscopes was submitted by Mr Dean on a tear-stained napkin slid, in the early hours of Thursday morning, under the Salient door. It appears here unaltered.]
It was a cold winter. Icy cold. Freeze your face off cold. The kind of cold that you wouldn’t want moving into the house two doors down from yours. The kind of cold you wouldn’t grant permission to marry your daughter, not that that would change anything after all—this cold doesn’t ask for hands in marriage. It takes them. That’s how cold it was. Steam did not so much cloud out of people’s mouths as escape like a crazed blue collar criminal digging his way out of minimum security prison with a spoon. I did not so much walk as glide down the ice slick side walk. Exploding fire hydrants had sprinkled the roads with deadly water. Ever seen water strangle a man to death in the hot midsummer while out playing lacrosse? Not a pretty sight. Not one I would recommend. I wouldn’t pay to see it again. Deadly stuff, water. Deadly like death by poison or falling masonry. No one knew why the fire hydrants had exploded. It was a mystery, a haunting riddle song lilting through the decrepit trees of urbania, a question silently yelled by every omnipresent aggrieved fireman. The police said they were investigating. But they say a lot of things. Lots of people say a lot things. Sometimes I wish I was back on that mime colony. Nice places, mime colonies—somewhat sparse though, a feng shui nightmare. How do you know where the energy flows when all the walls of your house are metaphoric? Questions beget questions it seems. I was on my way to the store to buy some food. I was hungry, see. Hungry not like the country Hungary, more like the country where no one ever has any food because business has gotten slow, gambling addiction means that I’ve had to sell all my other clothes to a homeless man for hug that I plan to trade for a miracle and win the lottery. That country was my soul, see. That’s right. Things had gotten tight. Money was low like back yard paddling pool with a giant leak caused by twelve-year-old chain smokers filling it with champagne that they somehow got their little mitts on. Finances were short like a dwarf that lives in a vice inside a shrinking machine on Jupiter.
I still wasn’t sure how I’d pay for the food at the store. I wasn’t beneath theft, I would do it if I could, especially since the last time I went to this store the keeper made a snide remark about my paying for a loaf of bread with pennies I stole with magnets from charity collectors. He cut me deep with his words, cut me deep like seventeen monkeys knife fighting with machetes in your living room with greased floor.