Just after noon, at the intersection of Mission and High streets, I saw her at the wheel of a tan SUV. The red light held us both, each vehicle facing the other.
With an Oregon gray-winter-solstice-zombie stare, her eyes looked ahead at Nothing.
I knew her in the ’90s. She was a Mormon . . . probably still is. Four kids and a utilitarian marriage— functional, its passion drained years back by an exhausting commitment to full immersion in a religious lifestyle.
I recalled how, this time of year, the church service, volunteer obligations, family management, and holiday expectations always left her brittle.
Fifteen years ago, to distract herself, she began joining multilevel marketing companies that promised honest products, sales opportunity, wealth, and vacations in the islands.…
Help! The teachers are killing each other With number 2 pencils and wooden rulers and sharp-edged papers and expectations and heavy folders filled with data.
Ms. Rowles is dead on the floor, The principal’s master key jabbed Into her cross-sectioned left ventricle. Her last words were “Don’t forget to study for the test.”
Mr. Carpenter is heaped over And still twitching on his keyboard. His blank eyes, fixed on his wall that house a century’s worth of senior pictures, Are filled with purple blood and drenched in clean tears.…
My balcony hangs in the air on the eighth floor, with a view of Chicago’s skyline. I grasp the flowery porcelain mug in my hands, taking a sip of coffee, and admire the plants and flowers surrounding me. One might say I have a green thumb, but I think the secret is that I love gardening, not for the sake of the work itself, but for the life it creates. I encourage what I plant to grow, and I thank them and give them compliments for their beauty, for the zeal. I talk to them as if they can hear me, but even if it’s not the words they understand, they must sense the vibrations of care, so they flourish.
I wasn’t in love with him, yet. But he gave me that odd little fridge buzz, somewhere inside me – in more than one place inside me, in fact – that made me aware that love was a possibility. That feeling that one’s heart has been replaced with a Victorian mechanical replica; one that still works perfectly well, but now emanates a steady metallic slapping of gears, coarse but warm like beetle wings, sometimes louder, sometimes softer.
I wasn’t in love with him, yet, although my compulsion to invite him to every conceivable non-date activity that I could – anything other than an actual date, naturally – and the icy, terrified delight each meeting brought me suggested that perhaps I was. I couldn’t be, though: we hadn’t even been on a proper date.…
Zeus wears pin-striped togas and storms around his boardroom. He still has an eye for the ladies. At the office, we call him Dad, because there’s a pretty good chance he is. His son, Ares, is a badass. He could pick a fight in an empty room. Another son, Hermes, got caught last year lifting Chuck Taylors from the Parkway Mall. He still works at FTD.
Poseidon lives on Daytona Beach: Hawaiian shirt, flip flops—a Jimmy Buffett type—schmoozing fishermen, posing for tourists. But don’t catch him in one of his moods. He can whip up a hurricane toot sweet—massing thunderheads, crashing waves, the whole nine fathoms.
As for the other members of the Olympus Rod and Gun Club—well, Casio is still the god of bad timing, and Amnesia wooed a meadow by posing as an adjacent meadow but couldn’t remember her original form.…
Author’s Note: Serge Lecomte describes his work as eclectic because he is still learning and is willing to experiment with shapes and colors depending on the mood (sometimes contradictory) of the theme he might be working on. The images are a blend of the natural world and imaginary creatures. Some of his paintings have a subtle message, but most do not. Then again, you see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear. …
