PETER ORNER

Summer or whatever you call that even hotter time before summer starts because your skin wasn’t used to the night heat yet and the mosquitoes began their bloodlusty moaning. How their noise changed as the night went deeper. In the beginning of the night they were feverish because of the unbearably beautiful proximity of your flesh and yet the netting and the coils worked for the most part and the lust changed to frustration and you’d listen to their hunger for you rise and dissipate, rise and dissipate, until you sank into a sort of stupor that didn’t feel like sleeping until you woke up in the morning and realized you had slept, that it hadn’t all been a waiting. And in the morning, the hopeful ones, the hangers-on, so exhausted from unrequited aches they were simple to kill, and so on hot mornings you’d hear, from every room in the single’s quarters, the sound of joyous acrobatic whacking, easy rolled-newspaper slaughter, even from Vilho's room, all that Jesus talk and he was just as much murderer as we were, and then we’d show off the carnage on our walls, give each other mini-tours of death, got this fucker with a backhanded pinkie, the flattened asterisks, the lucky ones blotched too, sated with our own blood now on the wall, always forgetting that tonight our victories would mean nothing, that they’d all be re-born, re-incarnated fifty, a hundred, a thousand times, and that killing them would always be the same as not killing them.

- An Excerpt From The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner (Little Brown and Company, April 2006)