bullpenned

NEVSKY PROSPEKT
by Melissa Bull

A suited-up drunk careened off his steed, shouting at the sparsely moving traffic on the street. A young woman led the horse by its bridle in high-hipped jeans, sneakers and blond hair to her ass. Stray bitches lurched from fleets of street-cleaning Humvees, their half-dozen tits as rubbery as baby bottle areolae. I walked past the McDonald’s, past the Coca-Cola sign, past the restaurant with the black guy decked out like a pirate all hours of the day. I didn’t know my address, but I recognized my place by the green Lada stranded in front of the building where in the courtyard, litters of kittens glommed on to garbage containers, mewing and flicking their tails in the dusty beams of dawn’s mid-morning light. I unlocked the twelve bolts on my door, showered under a dribble of rusty-urine-stinking water in a fuchsia showerstall with a radio option and lay down between sheets printed with astrological signs on a plush pull-out sofa. A dream-catcher hung from the ceiling fixture. When I took off my glasses it fuzzed out of focus and its plastic beads swung shapelessly in the breeze of the open window.




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Bull works in Montreal as a writer, editor and translator. "Nevsky Prospekt" was first published in the Université de Montréal's Festival du homard: A fresh catch of Montréal writing (2009).