"A Catalogue of Possible People, Pt. 3" by Miguel Alcázar

A Catalogue of Possible People, Pt. 3

~ Someone who never leaves his neighborhood, whenever reaching its geographical borders uttering the old Latin motto: nothing further beyond!

~ a candidate who arrives at a job interview only to find out that his improbable future manager is the woman he shouted at, in a traffic jam, about an hour ago.  

~ someone who has bought a second-hand car from 1974, whose stereo—she will find out—only broadcasts live radio shows from 1974.

~ Balzac, creating about three thousand characters for his Comédie humaine, all of them him, too.

~ a wise girl who prefers complex books as she considers them best for making your mind wander from the text and into the space.  

~ someone who works extra hours just to spend more time at his company’s modern headquarters rather than at the crappy apartment he happens to rent.   

~ an aspiring writer who still doesn’t know that you only start getting works published after you finish reading the full archive—all the way back to 1953—of The Paris Review’s “The Art of . . . ” interviews.

~ someone who can’t stop thinking of butter—why, he doesn’t know.    

~ someone obsessed with the idea of finding herself on Google Street View, routinely navigating the streets of the cities where she used to live, trying to spot her silhouette on the sidewalks or zebra crossings near her former homes and workplaces, never ceasing to hope she’s somewhere there, digitally preserved on the internet version of the world.

~ someone who tries never to walk over her own shadow, as she believes this will bring her many years of bad luck.

~ the innovative graphic designer who advocates for titles and authors’ names to be entirely removed from the covers of literary books and any sort of image or illustration on them, too.   

~ Pasolini: atheist, communist, homosexual, and the director of The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), in the opinion of the Vatican’s official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, the best movie on Christ ever made.  

~ traffic light figures, finally taking a break around two in the morning, stepping down and sitting on the edge of the sidewalk to tell each other about the best anecdotes of the day, enjoying one of their tiny cigarettes, drinking a bit of champagne.

~ Bob Dylan, referencing A Nightmare on Elm Street on one of his last songs.

~ anyone on the night they turn thirty, dreaming a dream that always contains the same elements, namely: the street where they used to live; their first love’s face; the moons of Jupiter; a Roy Orbison song; the howling of wolves; the moment they first got their heart broken in two.  

~ someone with an invisible monkey on her back (she’s up to no good—the animal takes care of that). 

~ now thinking of butter, y’all.    

Miguel Alcázar

Miguel Alcázar was born in 1987. His writing has been featured in Gravel Magazine, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Chicago Literati, and Maudlin House.

Headshot: Jovita Marks

Photo Credit: Staff