something about Urban Waite's "The Terror of Living"

Urban Waite debuts with The Terror of Living: A Novel, a story of a chase sparked by greed, desperation, cruelty, and chance. The Terror of Living resembles Cormac McCarthy's 1997 hit, No Country for Old Men. So much so that I found Waite's rendition a little tedious. Waite's dialect-saturated narrative relies on a calculated use of demonstrative pronouns to achieve rural down-home authenticity; it all rang false for me. Waite has been recognized for this novel and another titled The Carrion Birds. Here he just simulates the McCarthy experience badly.

a paste: "Something and Not"

 "Something and Not"
  - By Ellie Tipton

We kept walking that day, further than the last.
Somehow the pond was here.

The dense monochromatic heatwave
hovering on the path

so that it bent the air with weight
or atomic gnats.

We left our lovers.
We left ourselves.

How we looked as children –
how we looked as children filling in the silence.

We felt such great emphasis
when the cat-tails furred and shed seed.

When the rains came for days and days –
a skein of sewer run-off iridesced on the surface.

We wanted all this. And the tree-root
became the place where we asked for more.

This had everything to do with us becoming perfect.
And much later, the world —

Think of someone you love. Someone who is so essential that you forget they live. Whose presence looms so large in your life that you take them for granted. Someone who, it's only when they're gone, that you really understand what they mean to you.

Imagine that person far away. Imagine that person being told to wear an orange jumpsuit. Imagine that person positioned before a high-definition camera in the desert. Then imagine that person forced to their knees. Imagine, dressed head to toe in black, a zealot with a bright knife. The zealot, with a hand on your loved one's shoulder, speaks to the camera and says he has no choice. Your loved one will die and no one will be responsible and no one could have done anything differently.

Imagine the zealot puts the knife to the throat of your beloved and cuts through the skin, tears into the muscles, saws through the tendons, and hits bone. Imagine your loved one gurgling, blood urging out. That's how they die.