I met a man fresh out of prison once. I was in a bar downtown round midnight. He walked in and ordered a scotch, then another. I didn’t say anything, but I could tell he wanted to talk. You don’t walk into a bar alone to avoid people.
He got to reminiscing before too long. At first he wasn’t talking to anybody in particular, then he started looking at me, then before too long I was the only one he saw.
He told me he’d been in prison five years, but not to worry because he was innocent. Most people inside are innocent, he said – except, of course, the ones that aren’t.
Most of what he said, though, had to do with wrists. He told me people never rub their wrists when the cuffs come off, when they’re thrown in the cells or leaving the system. …
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Lenny let another rock fly from his slingshot toward the ancient weeping willow just on the other side of the fence. A flurry of little songbirds took to the sky.
Lenny used to be fun, but now all he wanted to do was shoot things. Through the kitchen window, Maribel could see her mother with the coffee pot and Lenny’s mom holding up her cup. She wished they would hurry up.
“Aren’t you scared you’ll hit an angel?” Maribel asked. “I saw a picture in the paper of an angel that got shot by a hunter.”
Lenny lowered his shooting arm and turned to face her. “My dad said that picture was fake. And anyway, I’ve never seen an angel around here.” He scanned the yard looking for his next rock.…
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Turns out, when you die, you are judged by a council of dogs. If you find yourself surprised by this, I challenge you to think of a better system.
They sit on high, in judgment upon you, from behind an elevated white marble desk.
You know their names at once, because they have personalized name plates in front of them — along with open notebooks and capless pens, plus a bowl of water each, and platters piled high with bacon bits and bite-size chunks of filet mignon. The dogs sit with dignity on cushioned chairs. There are seven of them: Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth.
Sloth and Wrath are eating, and Envy sips at her water. Gluttony, notably, is not touching his food.…
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She sits across, lounges across really, the length of the wide red sofa chair. Her calves, ankles, feet dangle over the armrest. Her head and neck scrunch, xylophone style, against the other side. She plays cats’ cradle with a loose string of yarn she found in the apartment lobby. She hasn’t paid attention to the last half hour of the movie. A Western, her friend recommended. It is number 47 on Ramona’s must watch movies list.
She doesn’t watch the movies in order. She actually had never noticed they were numbered until tonight. She had watched another Western last weekend, Dances with Wolves, and felt like she should stick to the genre. She hadn’t stuck to the genres before, either, but she had also never seen a Western before.…
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I’m minding my own business when I walk right into the path of my double—my own doppelgänger.
Everyone is supposed to have one, you know. And mine, well, I’m a little disappointed that she isn’t as pretty as I like to think I am. She has some flaws, and they’re obvious right away. Her nose is a little bit offline, for one thing. And she’s wearing red cat-eye glasses—I wear contacts—that sit a little bit crooked on that crooked nose. She’s also dressed with no style whatsoever, not at all rocking the saggy brown wool coat, in my opinion, and the thrift-shop flowered blouse. Her jeans are threadbare. Her hair is a bird’s nest of frizzy Miss Clairol Shimmering Sands Blonde.
We look at each other.…
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Oliver surveyed his beloved street from his front porch, a glass of lemonade in his right hand, an easy smile etched onto his boyish face. It was one of those delightfully crisp days in early fall, with a sky so clear that a person might have seen all the way to Chicago, if only the world was flat. Setting down the lemonade, Oliver unrolled the sleeves of his flannel shirt. With evening fast approaching, the autumn chill had begun to bite. Off to his left, Lake Michigan made a glittering appearance—a sun-speckled artwork framed by the street’s townhomes. The charcoal smell of the evening air filled Oliver with a pleasant nostalgia for his childhood. But Oliver did not wish to be young again—he was having far too much fun being twenty-seven.…
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Summers mean walking
every morning, listening to pink and orange
music as the drifting turns into waking.
I see dead birds along the sidewalks morning to morning and think of…
I think differently now, I acknowledge the birds and say my internal prayer
and thank them.
One morning I take an egg from the sidewalk
abandoned, rested on my desk for a week
only to explode while on the phone with a friend.
…………….The windows are down in the still-daylight summer evening and as I make my turns to downtown – teens walking alone/in pairs along the reaches of the sidewalk streets—I see the flashes of lightning in the blue in between rooftops like flashlights
…………….beneath the skin.
…………….With my windows down,
…………….…
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