Shane looked down at the familiar pattern of scratches on the floor, a lopsided snowflake etched by years of boot heels and chair legs. As he did every week, he found the sooty remnant of blue electrical tape that he’d always treated as center stage, or as a spot close enough to center that the emcee never corrected his placement.
He pulled the rickety wooden chair half an inch forward and eased into it without moving the guitar. As he fixed its tuning and adjusted his capo over the second fret, he looked at the sparse crowd, scanning the foreheads so as not to distract himself with eye contact.
Shane thought through the short set he was about to play, and about whether his voice felt up to it after a long shift taking drink orders.…
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Jo-Jo entered commercial establishments sideways, facing right. He hailed taxis with his right arm. During company staff meetings, he planted himself in the end seat, POV starboard. Did Jo-Jo have a psychological problem? OCD? Did an animal eat the left side of his face? Answer: No. Jo-Jo was a mixed-race baby. But not in the way you would think. He is racially divided down the middle. Entire right side, head to toe, white. Left side, Black. Body parts, even-steven.
So why did Jo-Jo’s white right precede the rest of him? He found that people are more likely to take him seriously. Or even take him at all. This is not a practice he pulled out of his nether region, but the result of twenty-five years of societal experience. …
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I have not talked yet about the flies. But they are so much part of what has happened, is happening, that any portrait of our collective misery is incomplete without them. They are the buzzing, maddening accompaniment to all our fears, all our sorrows. In the beginning, they invaded our city singly— that is, a few barely noticed droning little aerial grotesqueries, one alighting its bristled limbs on a streetlamp, another on the underside of the bookshelf, still another on someone’s bare arm— then in great black droves, altering the color and tone of the air.
At first, no one commented on them much because, in addition to having other matters to contend with, warmer weather always brought them in fairly considerable numbers into our city, even during ordinary years, and so they were nuisances that we all knew well.…
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When my mom died my sister was on her first vacation without the kids. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept everything the same.
My sister had gone to the beach for a peaceful yet rambunctious long weekend with her girlfriends. Four busy women got their schedules and sitters to align and declared they deserved a break. They deserved to be the only ones with needs for a few glorious days. I couldn’t have called screaming just as they put their luggage on freshly made hotel beds.
My sister and I always email pictures of our trips to our mother. We could be finishing up a 14 mile hike at the bottom of the earth and we can’t wait to get wifi and email our mom all about it.…
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She visits the playground almost every day. A lone swing stirs, and she knows it for what it is: a sign from her son that he’s still here, maybe not so that she can touch skin-to-skin, maybe not so she can breathe in tuna fish, sweat, and red licorice, but not gone either.
Once the playground was a vibrant place, crammed full of parked strollers and bags of Cheerios. Her son darted from the swing set to the sandbox to the covered green plastic slide that curved into a sudden drop. The other children grew up, started driving, went to college or work. The new crop of parents, calling the playground a death trap, petitioned for a safer area for their children, a place away from the woods, a place with rounded edges and soft landings.…
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Dark. Driving the country road on the way home to the city from her daughter’s, there was the county fair: Ferris Wheel, Tilt a Whirl, Fun House, lights a riotous invasion of a farm field.
Her daughter had told me she was pregnant again. Two children in two years. She didn’t need three. She had a part-time job as a bank teller. Her husband drove a delivery truck. They grew their own vegetables, cut their own hair.
Her daughter wanted her to move in with them before the new baby, be a babysitter, be with family as she got old, add her social security to what they had. Better for everyone, her daughter said. There was a little shack behind the run-down farmhouse. It has potential, her daughter said.…
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They raise a flag in time with the rising sun as the squad takes aim. “What a pity,” they say. Not bothering to cover the sound of their words. “She was such a lovely thing.” Mato looks up and meets my eyes, which would be a sign of submission to these savages. My father walks over and takes my hand.
I know he’s showing me mercy, letting me know that even though I carry the child of a ‘wild man,’ he still stands by me. He’s offering me sympathy. Not for my loss, as we stand waiting for my husband’s death, but for the indignities I suffered having to live such a life with the tribe. My tribe.
I see only Mato’s face as I step in front of the firing squad.…
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