Two dark-haired students wearing Brazilian-flag tee shirts undressed Jessica with their eyes. She tossed her red hair and turned her back on them. She’d arrived in Belgium from the States on Saturday, and this was her first day of a summer semester studying at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The orientation for new and reentering students had ended, and she weaved through French and Flemish conversations. She was in the square outside the arched portico of the Tower Library, a Gothic, gild-relief building. The sky was gray-smeared clouds.
A sandy-haired student wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a pink tie spoke in German-accented English to a fellow with a three-day beard and flowing blond hair under a black ski cap.
The German said, “Read Kafka. The meaning of life is that it ends.…
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I didn’t want to go that day, but my mother said we were lucky and had to give back. I was fine with just being lucky, but she was feeling all do-goody and dragged me to the church where they were handing out cleaning supplies and clothes and old people in World’s Best Grandma sweatshirts were drinking coffee and telling kids to keep it down. In the kitchen, a lady loaded our summer cooler with hot food coming off a big silver stove.
We were runners, she told us; our job was to deliver meals to the beach, where the storm had hit hardest. At the barricade, I thought it was cool when the National Guard checked off our names and waved us through, but my mother didn’t think it was a list you wanted to be on.…
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Rush hour traffic grinds to a halt at Lake and Bryant. Cold rain pelts the stopped cars, bikers, leashed dogs and one unmoving body heaped in the intersection draped in a purple cape; legs bent unnaturally back, broken eye-glasses inches from still hands, and silver hair bloodied. The purple now yielding to streaks of red. The paramedics’ frantic movements give way to a methodical loading of a dead body.
An elderly man leans against the ever changing stop light facing the accident. Rain floods his weary eyes, soaking his gray braided beard, his lips muttering “my other.”
“You OK? Looks like you’re sliding down the pole.” A tattooed twenty-something with a skate-board tucked under an arm says. “Let’s get you to the bench. There you go.”…
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“Men-men, honey, you have to stop!” Hume yelled. He took a few steps toward his wife, lifting his polished shoes high and placing them in the remaining grass-covered spots in the yard.
“Men-men!” he yelled from his grassy plateau, the lines in his forehead fissuring deeper.
Hume knelt on the ground, holding his hand to his princess, his beloved, his dirt-stained wife. “Men-men, pleeeease…please come up out of there,” he pleaded to his wife, her head level with his feet as she stood in her pit.
Spraying her white dress with loose dirt, Men-men tossed a billowing shovel load to a pile of earth’s layers behind her.
“Erimentha!” Hume yelled, punctuating each syllable with the staccato of the summer cicada.
Red-faced and smiling, Men-men looked up, smearing mud across her cheek as she pushed hair from her face. …
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Watch for her from across the street, making sure to steal glances from underneath the rim of your baseball cap. You don’t want to stand out, so you wear a Red Sox one, just like your dad used to have. Wait beside the pretzel kiosk and look casual. If you buy a pretzel, it will look more authentic. As you rip open the mustard packet with your teeth and spit the hard plastic corner onto the sidewalk, smirk at all the people rushing home, trying to avoid the rain, failing miserably. Become a backdrop to the human traffic, scurrying across the pavement like roaches.
She finally steps out into the rain, wrapped in a smart wool coat, fumbling with her red umbrella, jerking the handle until it blooms out in front of her.…
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An interviewer asked a famous writer: “How do you know what your characters are going to say?”
“Because they’ve already spoken,” she responded. “They’re real people and I’m just trying to remember what they said.”
“Then you aren’t really writing fiction?”
“I’m adding fiction to life,” the writer said, “making up a parallel world.”
“So much for your much-admired imagination,” the interviewer said.
(Pause)
“So, a famous writer was being interviewed,” the writer said in a somber voice, “by someone who kept questioning her methods and integrity. After putting up with it for as long as she could, the famous writer took a pistol from her purse and carefully shot the interviewer in his left eye.”
(Another pause)
“That’s not funny,” the interviewer said.
“Perhaps not,” the writer said, “but it’s not entirely fictional, either.”…
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It was almost funny – the way his was flattened across the satin pillow that propped him up like a doll. Everything was so incredibly deflated, as if someone had hooked him up to an air pump, blown him up real big, and then forgot to tie up the holes so that the air leaked out– whistling out through the nose, leaking out between the tiny lines that encompassed the balls of his eyes, heaving out of his mouth to leave him deflated. His cheeks were like a giant whoopee cushion except with his ears jutting out at the sides, and headphones plugged in as if he was listening to a soundtrack we couldn’t hear.
Maybe that’s why I wasn’t sad.
It was all so odd.…
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