A warm wind blowing in from the west made the exposed hairs of my legs and forearms sway and move. High in the sky the sun’s heat caused me to stir and slowly wake. My eyes opened and carefully focused on some blades of grass as I followed a small ladybug until she flew away. I was awake now, and fully aware of where I was. I was on top of my favorite hillside, overlooking a stream that ran to a lake a few miles north. What I was not aware of, was who was with me.
I was laying on my side, my left arm being used as a pillow for a girl I didn’t know, my right arm wrapped around her slender figure. Her hair blew softly with the wind and tickled my nose, bringing with it a beautiful smell I had never experienced.…
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The way that a single man carries the human race is a mystery. Some men carry it so closely that they have a place to put the catastrophes of human behavior when they come their way. They have a place for them in their body and on their face.
When the newspaper told Kamal Abdi in the morning of Nicaraguans killed or Salvadorans killed or Palestinians killed, he would make a place for them inside him. It was what he had always done. You started with the premise that the space you could make for them was infinite. Until human beings got it right, that was what it had to be.
On Saturday mornings, something very bright and alive would happen. On those days, he would not have to make a place for them inside him because he would have breakfast with his son.…
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The year 2010. He’s nothing I want to befriend, and I’m dripping in exhaustion, unable to rub two thoughts together. Spaced three feet apart, a gulf between us. A recumbent child, a dwarf, a lifetime could fill the hole between us on the bench. He says, “You missed a belt loop. And your pants are unzipped.”
I’ve dodged across the US all day, flown from Oklahoma to get to Texas to find Los Angeles to arrive in Albuquerque, all in pursuit of an additional forty-five dollars of savings. Now, in the late afternoon, I wait for a magic coach to carry me miles out to my car. I wait on a bench with a morose, humped-over man in black pants and a white shirt. With epaulettes and patches, a little American flag on his shoulder, a phone but no gun. …
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Justin’s basement was an open-air museum of ‘90s pop culture. Action figures, cassette tapes, professional wrestling belts, 16-bit video game consoles — it was enough to send any garden variety millennial into a euphoric tizzy. I wanted nothing more than to horse around with the sprawling collection of novelties lining the walls and bookshelf, but Justin was as stingy as he was nostalgic. We sat opposite each other, slumped in sticky polyester bean bags. I sucked down a billowing cloud of smoke, flicked a clump of ashes into a giant psychedelic conch shell, then passed the tightly-rolled joint back over to Justin. A round of aggressive thumps at the basement door interrupted the chilled silence of our smoke break.
I sprung to my feet and opened to the door.…
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Outside, the wind is whirling past Twelfth Street making the Pin Oaks tremble and the branches of the Norway Maples bow. Scattering those many conduits of seed across the sidewalks. The rain has stopped and the clouds hang in the sky like cobwebs stretched between the streets.
William sits on the couch and picks at a jagged edge of purple nail polish on his pointer finger. It’s satisfying to single out a fragment of the hard polish from the existing island and eradicate it. He inspects the liberated chip between his pointer and thumb then flicks it off.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” he says.
“Too late to back out now.” He watches his mother’s white socks walk through a pool of light on the oriental carpet.…
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Eight old men are dying behind a curtain in Brendan’s hospital ward. What they’re dying of I can’t say. But they’re dying. You can smell it. Sometimes I go over and talk to them, but they never say anything back. I go anyway, because I can’t just sit here and stare at Brendan all day. It’s too boring.
Right now I’m on Brendan’s side of the curtain. Like the song that says whose suicide are you on? I’m on Brendan’s. And he is a suicide. Well, almost a suicide. The doctor told us he took a very bad beating and drank a lot of Drano and that he’s going to be comatose for a while. He doesn’t know if Brendan got beat up and then drank the Drano, or if he drank the Drano and then got beat up. …
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He considered the phrase “last meal” and the men it brought to mind—death row inmates on the eve of their execution and Jews on the eve of their Yom Kippur fast. And Jesus, he supposed, who embodied both groups, by far the most famous Jew to eat a holiday dinner and then march to his death. Sliding a chicken into the oven, he toyed with the parallel. Enjoy your “last meal” you dirty fucking Jews, he would write in the comments sections on this Yom Kippur Eve. Hope every last one of you dies by sundown!
His apartment filled with the scents of cooking. Following advice his mother had emailed him five years ago under the subject line “Tips for an Easy Fast”, he did not overeat.…
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