“You know what happened to Stevie Nicks, right?” Colson says.
“What do you mean?” Kate is cutting up the coke on the mirror, her nails clicking against the surface. Her expired student ID makes neat white lines.
“She railed too much coke in the 80s and blew out her septum. So she started getting the members of Fleetwood Mac to put it up her ass.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“I’m just saying.”
“That’s not going to happen to me. I don’t do that much coke.”
“Whatever, man.”
Kate bends over the mirror, inhales, wipes her nose. Inhales again. Wipes her nose again. Colson is in love with her. He reminds himself of this fact as if it is medicine and he needs to take a dose. She reaches over from where she is kneeling on the floor and rubs his knee; he is sitting on their couch.…
...continue reading
I remember the moment when I began hating my music. I’d stood with an acoustic guitar off to one side of the lead vocalist. Sporadic hand-clapping rippled from the audience. The hotel half-filled. Couples mostly. The band glanced around at each other. A song with lyrics I wrote years ago started. Lyrics used to come to me back then, the way some people describe visions. One second my fingertips tapping to tunes the band gave me like heartbeats in a small animal. Then I’d write the words in crooked lines across paper. Later I sang them inside rooms, lyrics and guitar throbbing dully off walls.
Something fell out of me that night. I played on, strings blunt under fingers. The band continued, at times their eyes half-closed as if mesmerised by the surges of music.…
...continue reading
Metaphysics
One of the things I do is think of scenarios that would make you unattractive to me. It makes this life I’m in, the one where I love you, more bearable.
You don’t suffer in these imaginings, you merely transform in one way or another in your sleep and wake to be a different you, a you I can treat normally. I fear the descriptions of these transformations you’d find offensive and insensitive, since most often they are of an aesthetic nature, exposing my simplicity and lack of nuance. I’ve never been able to find beauty in the grotesque, for instance.
But your capacity to empathize with a variety of types is a quality I’ve always admired. Sometimes, in my scenarios, you wake without this quality.…
...continue reading
I didn’t hear the thunder. I may have felt it, swelling in air and buffeting close to me. Saw skies, shades of grey and purple, colors of bruises healing. I lay on my back, seagrass wisping dryly over me. Waves broke behind where I lay, spray hazing over skin, numbing me with cold. I couldn’t pinpoint the pain. It seemed centred on a hip as if I’d dislocated a bone. Scents of brine floated across me as if someone held smelling salts under my nose. I couldn’t move.
“Are you okay?” she said next to me. “Thought you were dead. My boyfriend’s calling an ambulance.” She bent down, gusting wind layering hair like bandages over her face.
I’d noticed it coming. The freshly turned earth smells, odor of downpours on steaming ground, rain angling, swishing through leaves and across bitumen roads radiating the day’s heat.…
...continue reading
Harry was tall and thin, elegant looking, silver-white hair; an older man, maybe 55 but what did I know? I was 13, maybe 14. It was hard to tell how old adults were. My father’s name was Harry so maybe that was why I felt safe with him. He started talking to me on the subway and I immediately responded, telling him how I wanted to be an actor, how I was coming home from rehearsal. Then it turned out we lived on the same block on the lower east side of Manhattan. Made sense. That’s why we were on the same train.
My father was fat and ugly, a mean man and it showed on his face. He hated me, hated that I was an actor.…
...continue reading
She always had to run to school. Run fast. If she didn’t wake by 4 am, it meant that she got behind on her chores, of which there were many for a girl of thirteen, and then she had to run. She would get up and put on a pot of water for the tea and porridge. Then she would run a short bath for herself—this was her favourite part of the morning routine because the cold water woke her up – and then she would get her mother out of bed and into her wheelchair.
The girl would take her mother to the bathroom and help her to relieve herself, bathe, and dress. They would finally return to the kitchen where the huge pot was now boiling, making the window above the stove steam up, obscuring the brightening world outside.…
...continue reading
It was barely noticeable when it began, no more than a zephyr, sighing, stirring the dusty ochre earth to eddy around the soles of her boots. She paid it no mind, the restless air. Not in this country. Not in this season. The sun? That was different, and she raised a weathered hand against its onslaught as she stepped from what little shade was offered by a torn scrap of faded canvas canopy that hung askew above the entryway.
A red car, a two-door import by the look of it, had rolled to a stop beside the only working pump. The radio, blaring rock music, went silent when the engine was cut and the driver’s door swung open. Out stepped a young man, on the shy side of twenty-five, she guessed. …
...continue reading