We were up in my grandmother’s big oak trees, the ones in front with the moss hanging down like witches’ hair. A Tarzan movie had come on the Early Show and me and my Cousin Johnny Wray were up there hanging on limbs with our shirts off making muscles. Johnny Wray could sound just like Tarzan when he called the elephants. That was the coolest thing that Tarzan did.
The problem with playing with Johnny Wray was that he always had to be the cool dude. When we played Gunsmoke, I had to be Chester, when we played Wild Wild West, he was always Jim West and I had to be Artemus Gordon. The worst was when we played Roy Rogers. I had to be Pat. …
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After Gabriel García Márquez died, I picked up my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera – or rather your copy, since your name is still written on the first page. For years, the book’s been a permanent fixture on my shelf; until yesterday, I forgot how it ever appeared.
You may not remember, but you gave me the book for my birthday, a day I hated and which I still hate, even though I have, in my old age, resigned myself to the fact that birthdays are like funerals – events which the guests require but which the person of honour would be just as happy to avoid. I never liked to talk about my birthday but somehow you got it out of me, which was a talent you had.…
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Newly Edited for 21stCentury Technological Phenomena
Room Décor, Chronology of
The daughter’s bedroom will undergo a series of very definite changes indicating the passage of time and the gradual estrangement of the daughter’s identity from your own. She collects horse figurines—expensive, painted things with spindly legs that always snap—and the interest makes Christmases and birthdays easy. You spend a week in the garage building the shelves where the creatures can live, and years later, after the horses have all gathered dust, you find her wrapping their super-glued, taped-up limbs in old t-shirts and storing them away for good.
Her room is painted over too many times to remember, favorite color under favorite color until she can find a permanent answer to the question, and you’re sure she never will.…
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Seth Eisen died on Friday, January 18, 2018. Or he did not. There were several possibilities of what occurred that evening. Here is the first.
It was Julie’s fault and his own as well. He hadn’t cleared the evening with her first, so when she, a bestselling novelist with an almost unhealthy love of animals (she had provided hospice services to not one, but two pets in the last year and hired a pet psychic to find her lost cat), was busy, Seth was alone. His high hopes for a relationship to Julie had been dashed earlier anyhow; the long string of solipsistic text messages about her new agent; her belief that her religious sister-in-law’s prayers had caused her Netflix TV deal and a contract writing for Archie; the realization that the chaos surrounding her was not a bug but a feature.…
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She doesn’t know what is she doing there. Or when did she think this whole theater was a good idea. Out of habit, she thinks, she did it out of habit, because Carlos was so tiresome that, in the end, she agreed only for him to close his mouth and leave her alone. She should have sent him to hell, but anyway.
She forces herself to think it isn’t so bad. In less than an hour, she will start drinking until she loses consciousness. She just wants her tongue to be free before they take her to bed so that she can tell everyone what she really thinks of them. She is going to tell her mother all the reproaches she’s been swallowing since she was a teenager, she’s going to throw in her father’s face his visits to “gentlemen clubs”, and then her future in-laws will be next.…
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“Thank you, Dad,” Kazhi said when Bruce handed her the bowl of porridge, because that was what he wanted her to say. Day by day, it felt more true. Thank you for only bringing food. Thank you for letting her live.
Beside her, Kazhi’s “sister”—white and blond to her black and brown—said thank you fervently. There was a time, not too many months ago, when Sarah had spoken of escaping. Had spoken of her parents, and the outside world.
Now, she spoke of pleasing their father. Now, she spoke of love.
To Kazhi’s other side, sitting slumped in the same manacles, was a dried-out corpse. Lakisha. Kazhi’s heart panged to remember the girl she had admired for years, the girl she had hoped would someday see her as more than friends, but Kazhi’s eyes were as dry as the stale air around them.…
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I can’t say the name of the school, but I guarantee you’ve heard of it, a world-renowned elementary school that looks like it should be the kind of bucolic liberal arts college where Donna Tartt might murder undergrads, only it was in Manhattan. That’s all I’ll say. I don’t want to give you too many clues. Legally, I can’t.
I was introduced to the twins my first day. The headmistress had told me about their family during orientation. “We give all our students extra special attention,” she said. “We give the twinses extraordinary special attention.” She then gave me an extraordinarily slow wink. There were three sets of twins in this family. Thus, twinses. I was the only person who seemed to think that odd. Or be bothered by that grammatical choice.…
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