Anthony Tognazzini

The Suicide

Imagine a kitchen with all the lights on, a curtain in the window rearranged by wind, a knife going into the heart. In your hands, on the wooden tabletop, the letter is unfolded. Your hands are absolutely still, but also full of fury since emptiness is a mountain we must slash down every minute while inside us there’s another mountain hatching. The letter is goodbye. Its small, brittle lines double as instructions to indicate pitch, latitude, emotional tone and what ways to properly ventilate the chest. Repetition finds us endlessly leaving. Autumn returns as the mother of fear. Carefully, re-read each and every word, then touch the page with disintegrating fingers so the skeleton of your old self is seen one last time, the way a leaf falling tells its life to the tree. But first you must learn to release what you love. And that’s when the stabbing begins.

The Enigma of Possibility

Derek had lost his job and was wondering where the rent would come from. Then he sat on the bed and ate a tangerine. His tongue worked round and round in a frenzy of tasting. His tongue was the longest tongue in the world. It was an extraordinary tongue. In his pocket there was a special tongue brush and a pair of tongue tweezers and his little blue tube of special chalky cleanser. He tried seeing if he could touch the wall with his tongue from the bed. He tossed the tangerine up in the air and, using only his tongue, caught it with a flourish. There must be some way I can get money for the rent, Derek thought, but how?

Anthony Tognazzini's work has appeared in Quarterly West, Salt Hill, Puerto del Sol, paragraph, Pindeldyboz, Hayden's Ferry Review, Double Room, Quick Fiction, Mississippi Review, River City, and the Alaska Quarterly Review, among other journals, as well as in Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction. He has received awards from Associated Writing Programs, the Louis Davidson Literary Foundation, Indiana University, the Academy of American Poets; and fellowships to the Prague Summer Writers Workshop and Ledig House International Writer's Colony. He is originally from California.

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