Big City

By Marream Krollos

A fiction of the city as a chorus of voices, an entity that is both one and many
 
Marream Krollos’s Big City is astructurally innovative work of prose composed of vignettes, verse, dialogues, monologues, and short stories. Alone, they are fragments, but together they offer a glimpse of the human condition and form a harmonized narrative of desire, loneliness, and beauty. Through language that builds, destroys, and violates, Krollos maps the geography of our contemporary condition, a haunting meditation on human togetherness and isolation.
 
Krollos plays with the tension between the voice of the lonely “I” produced by the urban experience and the polyphony of the city itself. A city is a chorus and a collection of traces; it is a way of being with others and the concretization of the social divisions that keep people apart. As a lifelong city dweller, Krollos is obsessed with the way that cities shape our experiences of the world, our ideas about inside and outside and self and other.
 
By mapping the emotional highs and lows of particular (though often anonymous) beings, the book creates a geography of the urban consciousness. The sensation of reading this lyric work of fiction is akin to how one experiences an attentive walk in an unknown city: one becomes attuned to the tenor of its many voices, how the languages lift and flourish, and how the micro and macro became integrally linked.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Alabama Press
• Release date: Sep 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781573668781

Book preview

died.

A MAN IN THE CITY IS WRITING A STORY ON A BUS

He thinks to himself, the sight of the nape of this man’s neck is the only comfort I have here.

Is she a man or a woman?

Everybody is against me.

Why should his kisses redeem her? It is the skin on her stomach that was wrong to stretch out over so much fat tissue, when touched by the skin of this man’s lips, nothing happens. It is not removed. It is not punished.

What is wrong is the feeling I have. Different thoughts are spinning around my head all the time. Then, suddenly, some of them stop. Some of them are bad and some of them are good. If only the happy ones keep swirling, then I am happy. If the bad ones keep swirling, then I am sad. That’s what makes my moods. Thoughts like those bugs who light up at night and twirl around trees. Some of them light up, some of them turn off. Everybody is against me. I see only the streaks of lighting they fire off towards me. The place where my heart is goes murmuring. It is not painful, it is uncomfortable. This is where your heart is, it says to me. What is this fighting and why does it happen? What are expectations and why do they come with contact? She did not have a pure feeling of love for me. I know the signs. One woman is walking past me. If she stops to look at me, and smiles, that is good. If she looks at me a certain way, this feeling will stop. It will stop if she wants to speak to me. The signs are expectations too. Everybody is against me. I can try to fight them, but there are too many. Whatever is blood for them they will take from me. Even things can be blood. My feet I accept, however. The hair can be removed there and they will look strong. Only one foot has scars from bites. My legs are good from the knee down, strong and firm. Except for one ankle where there are scars from bites. My thighs are not scarred, but the skin of my thighs is flimsy from having stretched out over too much fat tissue. Hairs are all over my thighs.

Stretch marks wrap around her thighs. She is a woman.

The skin of my ass is not smooth, but hairy. The small of my back is filled with little hairs and bites. The rest of my back has bites and purple marks. My stomach has hair and three scars from hairs who keep growing under the skin. My arms dangle and are scarred. My face has scars. I pick at the skin. I write on my face the home I have had, then, I want to wash it and be new and young again. A sign. A man says may I sit here. He does not talk to me. Expectations. I always drink too much like this. I always want it, but I can never enjoy it. That is need.

A man says to her I will draw on you in your own home. To give tattoos. She wants to say yes, but it is too easy. He may touch her with his hands not just his needles. Then I will be wrong. Something will happen to the skin he kisses. He may ask her who wrote this, as he is touching her