Kevin Brennan

What it all comes down to

Delirium passes, but unpolished illusions of memory never fade. 
The uncanny feeling of déjà vu strikes so often that 
whole loops of time have me smoothing the same 
umbrella handle over and over till the varnish wears away. 

You come to the point where the clock strikes five again. You
can hardly bear to go out in that dark damp night one more time,
but the odor of perfumes draws you, and the clacking of
quarters tumbling into the newspaper coin box. Little things. 

Synecdoche does the work so we don’t have to. Unhinged
we’d all be if we remembered every cup of coffee. Instead,
one great particular cup one copper-clad day stands in,
and our minds are freed up for other innumerable barmbracks.

Laughs, sparkling eyes, huge mugs and house boots—there’s 
a clutter of them in the trunk, assembled and disassembled
like words in an ever-revised story, comfortably summoned
to spare us from night sweats and the confusion of detachment

From our own selves, which are nothing more than wrongly
remembered song lyrics and flashes of photos from musty 
albums. Whatever other people might say, it all comes down to
the one short sentence about ourselves that someone else writes.


Kevin Brennan is the author of seven novels, including, just released, The Prospect. A Best Microfiction 2022 nominee, he's also the editor of The Disappointed Housewife, an online literary magazine for writers of offbeat and idiosyncratic fiction, poetry, and essays. Kevin lives with his wife in California's Sierra foothills.