You really should have seen the rest of the house, and the neighborhood, Richard. And the neighbors—my god. They were all out on their porches or working in their fucking yards or whatever. It’s horrible, unbelievable the way people will live. Identical houses and little squares of “nature” and it goes on and on forever. How can they tell who lives where and what is what? And they looked at me like some sort of criminal when I pulled up in my rental chariot. This one GIGANTIC woman watched me very carefully as I let myself into the house and I kind of wanted to STAY there for the rest of the day just to make her wonder what was going on inside. I wish I had been wearing long silvery gloves or a hat with wires that connected to my neck. But really it was just too depressing—completely empty except for IT (the couch), and you know how your voice and shoes echo in an empty apartment? It was like that but louder. Worse. It’s really a very sad little house.

SCOTT PRENDERGAST

mapS

Bear! You know our tribes are hostile.
When you give us consent
You grant the terror of the nations
And disgrace your tribe by crying

Bear! What can you do about Joe Lieberman?
Miscreant at sociology
In his heart one sorrow had he
Not for triumphs in the battle
That terrified his companions

He could shoot ten arrows upward
And listened with one foot uplifted
Till the sun dropped from the heaven Bright before it beat the water.

And he loved a lonely maiden

Bear! You know our tribes are hostile.
What can you do about Joe Lieberman?
Shall he hold supreme dominion?
Shall he hold supreme dominion?

NELL HANLEY

Each week the regime would send out catalogs to show us the new forms, the latest geometries. We would thrill to the harmonies of living areas configured according to scientific principles. And there they were, the perfect sofas of the future, uniformed in twill slipcovers and caressed by the manufactured sunbeams that slid like empty stockings into those ideal, depopulated rooms.

Gone were the paperbacks, game controllers, potato chips and bodily fluids, the laundry, the ashes, the sobbing spouse: the animality of the old couches had been banished along with the couches themselves. Our new sofas were sublime! Patriotic, streamlined, in mocha or moss or stone, they submitted themselves for nationwide delivery.

Of course this was after the first round of purges, when all the lumpy degenerate sofas had been flushed out of the cities and imprisoned in basements. And we'd already seen the early resistance, those ragtag Goodwill units, decimated by the counterinsurgency (with its highway checkpoints, its rec room raids, its interrogation warehouses.) Driven
underground, the rebels recovered themselves gradually. They stockpiled weapons and yard-sale tchotchkes, and infiltrated several of our largest moving companies. Furtively they grew stronger, while we were distracted by the spectacle of the housewives marching daily in front of Headquarters, holding up pictures of their missing furniture.

This is a photograph of one of the reputed rebel leaders, who during the crackdown had been taken into custody and questioned—the resulting lacerations are clearly visible here—and then mysteriously released. Surrounding the sofa are all the squalid hallmarks of a degenerate living area. The picture was posted on the internet by a group claiming to be affiliated with the insurgency. It cannot be determined whether the image is authentic or doctored. At the present time we cannot even say for certain that this sofa still exists.

KAREN OLSSON