When I walked in to Davies Symphony Hall for the first concert of the season, like usual, it was glowing with a gold tint. The low yellow lighting, the hanging sound-reflectors that reflected the beige stage and the few scattered musicians’ instruments already warming up, and the golden pillars spread out along the walls accounted for that. Patrons of both sexes were pouring into the hall in a steady stream, mostly coupled.
I arrived at my seat in the middle of the premier orchestra section and sat down next to a bald elderly man with the curled mustache of a connoisseur. As he turned to greet me, my gaze fastened to his large but rimless monocle covering the specimen of his inquisitive eye, like the lid to a petri dish, which it magnified almost double along with forcing what looked like an almost painful contraction of the eyebrow supporting the monocle, giving him the stately refinement of a man-of-the-world.…
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1. My mother’s vodka. She bought a big jug of it because her parents were coming to visit, and they always had vodka and tonics before dinner. But they stay ed at a hotel and ate at restaurants, and so the big jug just sat there, perched on a wooden rafter in our drafty little cottage, unopened. My mom only drank socially, and then just a glass of wine or something.
The month before my 14th birthday, I took the jug down. My best friend said she was pretty sure that vodka and Coke was a thing, and so we bought a couple cans of Coke and mixed up our drinks in the kitchen, filling the water glasses with half Coke, half vodka. It tasted like paint thinner mixed with earwax.…
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I wrapped the watch in the old cigar box just as he had when he gave it to me for my twelfth birthday. He said his dad had given it to him when he turned twelve and that he wanted me to have it now that I was old enough to take care of it. The box still reeked of the cigars he used to smoke when he drank. He gave the watch to me a couple of days before he locked me and my mom and my little sister out of the house in one of his fits. That’s what mom used to call them, fits. We had to walk to Grandma’s in the dark that night and sleep on the green shag carpet of her living room that smelled like cat pee that’d been there for twenty years.…
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Evening rain seeped into the city ground to sleep that night. The boys wandered down alleys, jumped fences because they could, and ran through the dorm corridors for recruits. They found Sharon and Ashley in their room, readying for the night. The dresser door hung open and clothing collected in corners. They enlisted the girls to join them in their aimless revelry. “The night will be dreamless, and boundless.” They bartered promises for company.
Charlie had just taken his final exam earlier that day. It was the last day before holidays began. Then they would return home for a winter hiatus of boredom, Christmas turkeys and lousy reunions. The kind when everyone pretends that they have their life together and, over cheap cocktails parading as symbols of sophistication, smiles broadly at one another, bearing teeth, to convey post-adolescent success.…
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The sun will tell you
it is too early for destruction
continue to shut the doors and
windows to keep the house from
coughing on your misery
Basket the ripest apples and set them
on your neighbor’s porch with
a recipe for pie crust
Funeral his picture beside
the thickest root where
the moss refuses to grow
Rake a wreath of dry leaves
for kindle and smear mud into
the grooves of his carved name
Evacuate the birds and squirrels
say a prayer for the ants along branches
there isn’t enough time to save them all
Soak the tire swing in kerosene
swing back and forth against gravity
and light a match across the bark
Ignore the smell of burning flesh
let your lungs breath slow and
listen to the scream of leaves
– Karla Cordero …
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