A quiet stairway at summer camp. The scent of redwood trees. We sat on the steps and talked. We discovered each other the night before. That next day, we blew off all the camp activities and spent the day together.
We laughed at each other’s stories. Your voice was soft and low; your eyes younger yet wiser than mine.
We lived too far away from one another to really make a go of it, but we tried anyway. Far from the days of algorithms and the forever-instant-now, we exchanged addresses and promised to write. I wrote to you in my tortured grade school cursive; you wrote back in clean, smooth lines.
All the letters from you I kept snug in a paperboard box. I crave to read them now.…
...continue reading
Have another little piece of my heart now, baby. You know you got it if it makes you feel good. Glenda, my best friend’s mom, harmonizes with Janis Joplin’s gravelly voice like she’s singing the sacred anthem of wild women everywhere. She has a beautiful singing voice, so I try not to be too mad that the song has been on repeat for the last hour, but it’s grating on my already fried nerves. When we finally cross back into Wisconsin, less than two hours from home, I feel like I’ve stepped into my favorite pajamas after a long day. The hurly-burly left in me begins to settle.
Since we were little, Molly and I have lived down the street from one another in a small farming community tucked neatly between sprawling corn and soybean fields.…
...continue reading
Something out of the corner of his eye. A flash of primary color, a sense of a person lurking just beyond peripheral vision. The gag reflex of strong perfume. When he spun around, nothing lurked outside his windows on Central Avenue, besides the ebb and flow of car traffic. Constant distraction right when he didn’t need it.
George Lynch had never suffered writer’s block before. He was a copywriter for hire. Wrote whatever needed to be said. Whatever paid. This project was different though. George had worked on a number of assignments for Judd McBrunt. And Judd insisted on calling, not texting, to further annoy and derail George’s train of thought. Yet he had to pick up. His office being the desk in an apartment in Bellington, a small city along California’s south coast.…
...continue reading
“It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention” – Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Three or four books lie on my nightstand, commingled with hand lotion, emery boards, and lavender oil. The tabletop suggests the luxury of self-indulgence and the whimsy of arbitrary reading. I always have a thick hardbound book ready, a big long story whose purpose is completion. Self-improvement books also sprawl there, usually by Brene Brown or Gretchen Rubin, explaining how to get happier in my head or in my home. Sometimes I swap out the self-help book for a book about writing, hoping that reading about writing will overnight, subconsciously, develop my skills. A plastic-covered library book gathers dust, my interest as casual as my financial investment.…
...continue reading
Every afternoon she parked and walked off at five past four, leaving the car for her ex-husband who lived opposite my office, her clothes changing as the trees changed, wrapped up as leaves fell, insulated under bare branches, exposed flesh returning with green’s return.
Skeletal trees appeared again. I watched her parking, expecting to see candelabra-tree shadows on her disappearing back; but she walked towards her ex-husband’s flat, the first time I had seen this, her arms swinging, back upright, intention gripping her face.
She entered her ex-flat. Then: SWERRAAAACCCC!
My work colleague looked at me.
“A car back-firing?” I offered.
“I didn’t hear a car,” Peter replied.
“OH MY GOD!” the ex-husband screamed. “OH MY GEAWWWDDD!!”
X’s voice flailed tentacle possibilities in my head. Our manager crossed the road and knocked on X’s door.…
...continue reading
We think of day and night in symmetry, in endless succession but day was born from the long cold pre-Solar night and in the heat-death of the universe will collapse back into night once more; time will end. And so this, the ticking of a great clock, is an odd instant between two faceless expanses of darkness. The symmetry we feel between light and dark, morning and evening is just a brief chapter in which light almost holds darkness at bay. It has rained too heavily all day to go out and now as the dusk draws in I sit at the small table by the window, at the top of the stair. The maid has brought me a lamp, some quills and ink from my study.…
...continue reading
What country did I rule? What pirate did I befriend? Did I know Harry Winston personally? Whatever my past lives were, no doubt, I carried my passion for jewelry with me into this incarnation. I am VS1-clear on how important jewels are to me. Before I could walk, I accessorized. Baubles have fascinated me since day one, and I remember wearing a plastic teething ring as a bracelet. How kind of fate to bring me into the world in the month of the diamond. If only I were born wearing a birthstone ring.
While others carried dolls and toys, I carried my jewelry box with me in my young years. When playing with friends on the front stoop —yes, stoop, not porch, not steps, I grew up urban, inner-city — I’d take each piece out and position it on the top step, rearrange the necklaces, put all the rings together, then lift and coddle each piece before putting it back in the pink, cardboard jewelry box.…
...continue reading