When I graduated high school I figured I’d spent enough time sitting at a desk. I thought about everything I’d learned in school and out, and figured that my most salable skill was painting houses. I was living in L.A., which made house painting possible year-round, unlike Michigan, where one of my cousins lived, where winter shuts down the world.
I got a truck, a ladder, brushes, got cards printed, gave them to my friends’ parents. Word- of-mouth took care of the rest. Some friends came back for holidays and said: You’re smart. You could have made something of yourself. But every day I renew the world. I take old surfaces and refresh them, put gladness in the hearts of homeowners and neighbors and even people just driving down the street.…
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She lived in the third floor apartment of a very tall and narrow brownstone at the south end of the District. A spindly tree of indeterminable age sprawled skyward and cast a dark and cool shadow across the building, its branches and leaves reflected in her window, looking so much cooler than the summer night sky it was mirroring.
A long and wide cement staircase tumbled down from double white doors, curving for the last five steps that widened as they reached the sidewalk. A cast iron railing provided guidance and comfort and a feeling of security.
He had been out for a walk that first July evening, clearing his head from something he’d been trying to write, failing miserably, the sickness of the silence digging deeper into him than ever before.…
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All to him was a morass, a hurly-burly intertwining of decomposition and formation, of crumbling and construction, the eternal transformation of space at every moment. Wherever he looked he saw decline and ascent, the rise and fall of seas past the farthest horizons. Cities crumbled, elsewhere cities rose; into the pits was gravel poured to staunch the demise by being a new ground for new birth, which soon would grey and become mulch.
“What is the purpose of life?”
“According to the Existentialists there is no inherent meaning to the universe except what one gives to it.”
– Joel Netsky …
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She looked at the six shots lined up before her. They stared her down. One, two, three, four, five and six. All vodka. All full to the top and waiting. A lemon-flavored Gatorade stood at the end, the ugly duckling of the bunch.
She had heard that a fetus less than twelve weeks old would not survive six shots of alcohol. It was how all those sorority girls had gone to keggers and fraternity hookups every weekend and rarely taken home a little linebacker. It was just too much for something that fragile. Something that new and pure. It didn’t matter what poison she picked, any one would do the job. She refused to hear the term “aborted” in her head.
She didn’t know if it was twelve weeks.…
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