Our plans were made in the wake of disaster. We endured two hours on a 27-mile-stretch of stop-and-go roadblocks and hazard-flashing work crew trucks before reaching what we assumed was downtown Miami. The television aerials of chaotic devastation since the storm had been dramatic. But on the ground, the smells, the rotting food in the tropical September heat, the stench of decomposing carcasses of pets, backyard animals, and vegetation was overwhelming, not something film footage could capture.
We had driven eight hours total. The massive hurricane ravaged Miami two weeks prior and four of us, a professor, a realtor, an engineer, and me, a physician decided to volunteer with the cleanup. We had been close friends for twenty years. But now we were just church guys trying to help: Life is for service.…
The third jump wakes the turtle, expatriate of the brackish backwater. And when no one is watching, the tides – inch by inch, neither salt nor fresh – erode my half acre. My half-life
spent sideswiping mile markers of gravel and tar and spinning spinning elliptically with inflated verve. Summoned
back not just to indentured space, but slingshot to lace and latticework, the familiar linens and pillows still holding
our heads’ heat and indented shapes. All trace evidence, all reluctant keepsakes.
I am a planet again.
I remember closing time when the cabana boys appeared. They would gather the sodden towels arch with sifted sand and roll their rickshaws along the boardwalk. The day ceiling…
The isolated village didn’t appear on any maps. It existed just below the timberline, surrounded by stands of white pine trees. Less than four hundred people lived there and those who did had done so their entire lives. When or how the sundown to sunrise Skeleton Day ritual became a tradition was unknown. But it had taken place every seven years at the Winter Solstice for as long as anyone could remember.
Preparations for the observance involved every man, woman, and child in the village. In the week leading up to Skeleton Day, the men gathered small branches, large tree limbs. They also trimmed logs to be the main poles of the three bonfires they’d construct on the village common. Heavy with frozen sap, the logs had to be trussed up with ropes and dragged by hand across the frozen ground.…
God-With-Us was walking through a Birmingham suburb, followed by a large crowd. Many who lived in that neighborhood came out on their front porches, angered that the crowd was trampling their lawns and setting off their car alarms. Assuming it was another peaceful protest, they shouted obscenities and waved their firearms in the air.
But one woman ran out to God-With-Us, saying, “I saw you healing people on the news! Please come inside and help my mother. She is terribly sick with the flu.”
So, God-With-Us went in and healed the woman. She got out of bed and, seeing the crowd, began making iced tea and brownies for everyone. God-With-Us rose to leave, but could not even make it to the front door because the crowd kept shoving another sick or injured or disabled person in front of him.…
It was the dead of winter, 1875. Pitch black as coal it was, and foggy. You couldna see your hand in front of your own face. That’s how we’d gotten off course, you see. We’d just left a small school of cod outside Lewisporte and was bringing TheDeluge ‘round north by St. Anthony’s Tip, hoping for better luck. We was further out than we had any right to be ‘cause we got turned around in that fog. We was all standing on the deck, peering through that thick blanket, trying to see any kind of thing to show us where we was going, or how to get back to where we’d been. Then, I swear to you Tristan, somewhere out there we heard a screeching unlike anything we’d ever heard.…
