God of Unfulfilled Longings

By | 1 December 2014

Happiness where are you? I haven’t got a clue. —Eytan Mirsky


Gina—pretty, thirty-two, and who wears a lot of black, not
because she is in mourning but because she’s got nothing else
to wear—has started making love with a boy of nineteen on
a semi-regular basis, a practice she finds vastly rewarding
although occasionally problematic, which is not to say the boy
hasn’t demonstrated a remarkable learning curve.

Elephants, having been hunted into near extinction, paint!
Sometimes better than people!

This one time, Gina’s boy (trapped in an elevator) thought:
I’m trapped in an elevator. You hear stories like this and never believe them.
The elevator rose thirty-six floors at an astonishing speed before
he hit the emergency button which, to his surprise brought him
obediently, politely, to the ground floor. He walked right out.


‘God of Unfulfilled Longings’ from the collection God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky,
published by Nightwood Editions. Used with the permission of the publisher.

This entry was posted in 65: CANADA and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Related work:

One Response to God of Unfulfilled Longings

  1. Pingback: What's Canadian at Cordite? Sandy Pool to Shane Rhodes - Arc Poetry