1
Nicholas Spice wrote about an elderly man
walking in the woods who meets a frog
that asks him for a kiss, promising
to turn into a princess. The man puts the frog
in a side pocket. What’s wrong with you?
the frog asks. A man your age needs a sweet princess.
The man replies, I would rather a talking frog.
2
As the Spanish dictator Franco lay dying in bed,
he was told that a great number of people had gathered
outside the palace in order to say farewell to him.
Why? the generalissimo asked. Where are they going?
3
Henry III was sent a polar bear
from Norway in the year 1251.
He ordered it tethered on a long cord
so that it could fish in the river Thames
from its den in the Tower of London. …
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I met Val when he was a pharmacy student at St. John’s in Queens. We were at a party thrown by my friend, who was his classmate. “Friday I’m in Love” by The Cure was playing. From across the room, he stood out, with his well-fitting clothing and his dark silky hair, slightly longer than most of the other men’s. He came over to talk to me and my best friend, Claudia. “Hey, how are you doing?” he said. Up close, I noticed that he was muscular and handsome, and he had a nice voice. Later, Claudia told me she thought he was my type, and she knew me better than anyone.
The next day Val got my number from the hostess and asked me out. …
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It is bedtime. The dishes are in the sink, the alarms are set, the doors are locked. Water drips from my hair onto one of his concert t-shirts. His skin is fresh from the shower. The leftover scents of our conditioners and soaps blend, tropical coconut, ocean breeze, brown sugar, lavender mist. He smooths the hair on top of my head and kisses me there before lying fully back. Pastel blankets and white sheets cover us. My right thigh is secure in his left hand where my leg is draped above his hips. I close my eyes. The streetlight outside the window turns grey as it filters through the blinds. This is our city. The highways we take to our parent’s houses, the streets we walk to work, the markets that sell us produce, the buildings that watch benevolently over us, the trails we run and bike, the restaurants and cafes we frequent.…
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Some told fortunes in teacups, but not Elaine. She saw futures in champagne, in the bubbles’ dancing. The pop of the effervescence whispered secrets to her intoxicated ears.
She first noticed this ability while toasting her sister’s married happiness. Although underage, Elaine tipped a glass of bubbly to cherry-stained lips and enjoyed her body’s heady response until there, in the golden glints of her flute, she saw the groom’s infidelity, saw the face of the other women. She discreetly threw up the wedding feast in the toilet, dismissed the vision, and sat out the rest of the evening’s dances.
When her sister sobbed into her lap a year later, Elaine stroked her hair and remembered. “I don’t know why he’s so different. He never has time for me any more,” her sister hiccuped.…
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I have never smoked. I despise smoky rooms and avoid public entryways with strewn cigarette butts and exhaled vapors from the mouths and noses of strangers. Still, a faint magnetic pull urges me to fill my own bronchial tubes deeply of tobacco smoke, hold the crest of it like a surfer’s wave until it rolls, dragon-like, out. The faint wafting of a cigarette on a breeze can set off this hankering, most likely linked to my childhood when cigarette packages were just beginning to post warnings.
Both my parents smoked in the house, and the car as we traveled. I hated it as an older teen. It embarrassed me. They were not cool smokers. Mom did not hold her cigarette elegantly with delicate, manicured fingers like the magazine adds.…
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One tree trunk paused our walk:
corkscrew-twisty,
as if a tornado had taken and spun it.
“Yes,” the dendrologist explained:
“more flexible, this tree, better survivor
than its neighbors—for instance
that one on the ground—to gale forces.
“Some of the storms we’ve had may even
have whirled it from the top—
like a top, you know. Over decades.”
With a finger I traced a spiral up its bark,
all the way back to boyhood.
“Son, you must redeem my insecurities.”
“Dear, you’ll despise the people I despise.”
Our group left that tree, found others. I
swung into the walk, feeling lithe—
by turning, turning, I came round right.
– Russell Rowland…
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Grief is sneaky. Like the most stubborn of weeds, it finds its way through every crack. Sometimes I’d be working on my computer and hear my phone ping or the sound of a car turning onto our road, and I’d nod to myself and think that must be Luke, and it would take a moment before the penny dropped. Something in me refused to believe he wasn’t somewhere close by. After all, he couldn’t possibly have gone far. At any second I expected him to come strolling nonchalantly into the kitchen and order whoever is in there to make him some food.
I mean, this was a guy who’d lived his whole life within half an hour’s drive of home. In the last decade, he’d left West Sussex only a handful of times.…
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