Rudi Dornemann

Little is known of the activities of the celebrated writer Jorge Luis Borges after he faked his own death in 1986.

There’s a shivering you feel in the air, and you can tell it’s coming from outside you, not inside.

“Soothing,” he’d say, and make her cocoa in a metal cup. “Codes sent around the world for spies, supposedly.”

Her arm, too, traced red on the night, a series of symbols that hung on the air through persistence of vision.

As we expected, the hard part was getting the ice skates on the alligator.

Walking home from school, I’d see him on the other side of the street, walking just as slow or fast as I did, swinging a Six Million Dollar man lunchbox that had dents in all the same places as mine.

We never let birds nest on him, even though the flat of his top hat was popular roost.

For each question there may be more than one correct answer.

From the empty apartment, we heard official confirmation: the moon had started targeting earthside cities.

This explains why cups of coffee placed on his desk ripple, and why some days his lunch consists of nothing but those bright orange circus peanuts.