BOMBlog’s Word Choice features original works of poetry, fiction, and art. This edition of Word Choice, selected by Peter Moysaenko, features fiction by Jesse Ball and art by Sophie Jodoin.

Jesse Ball’s cryptic fictions scramble broken codes. Memory frames memory, a foregone future, the body disassembling without ending.

At the Clinic

We are admitted at once, of course. There is a long line, but we brush right past. We are serious, it seems, more so than others. I wink at you. You laugh. On the walls all the laughs are painted in a baroque fashion, which means as gilt dolphins. You and I despise gilt dolphins, of course. Of course we do. The man who is waiting for us has drawn up the papers. “You are prepared to do this?” “We are,” I say. “Most definitely, we are.” “At least I am,” you say. “I don’t know about this joker.” You laugh; and this time someone rings a bell to answer you. It is just the man laughing. His laugh sounds like a bell that is being rung elsewhere. “If we weren’t ready before we came,” I begin to say, but the man shakes his head sadly. He holds up a sign: NO MORE TALKING. And then it is time.

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