Normally, they would have been up by 7:30—they got up when the dog did—but their dog had had a big day yesterday, an extra walk up and down the hilly streets of Baltimore and a longer than usual game of tennis ball in the backyard, and was still asleep. So the problem wasn’t that it was too early when they heard a woman’s voice calling them from their living room at 8:45; the problem was that a woman’s voice was calling them from their living room.
“Jerry? Sandra? You there?”
It was Elena from across the street, they quickly realized. They knew it was Elena because she always called Sandra SAHN-dra; she’d done it from the day they moved in ten years ago. They didn’t know if it was an affectation or if she’d just heard it wrong or if she had some kind of quirky speech impediment, although she didn’t call her daughter Mary MAH-ry, and when she had her sewer line replaced, she didn’t talk about how cute the BAHK-hoe operator was.…
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My grandmother’s wringer
washer, stolid on
their porch. We told her how
washing machines now
made life easier. No,
she used the wringer washer
until the end. Decades
of water pressed out
to hang clothes in the back yard
before watching
As The World Turns
on a black-and-white set,
problems of the Hughes
and Stewart families, what
she referred to as
“My story.”
– Kenneth Pobo…
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TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE
There are only two ways to get to Aunt Rox’s house: you either hop Lisa Buck’s fence or you take your bike and ride it diagonally through the patch of grass that connects Hummel Road and Ashland Drive, totally bypassing the Meyer’s.
If you decide to hop Lisa’s fence, you’re in the clear—we leave a nylon-strapped camping chair on Lisa’s side and a green plastic chair on Aunt Rox’s. There’s an understood rule that no one is supposed to move them, but if for some reason they aren’t where they are supposed to be, the fence isn’t too high. Sure it’s rusty, and its integrity questionable, but no one has hurt themselves. Yet. Just grip a toe in the metal slot shaped like a diamond, give yourself a little oomph, and by that time your other foot should be on top of the fence.…
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You are a video camera on a man’s shoulder. You spend most of your days in the equipment room at Channel Six News, but tonight you are hoisted shoulder-high before the stage at a local nightclub. It is February, 2003. You are capturing images, stills of color and shape at a rate of twenty-four frames per second. Almost fifteen hundred photographs per minute, creating a retrievable reality, as the air is still and goes in and out of lungs at that atom-thin edge between now and the future.
What you see now, unfeeling, is a hair-metal band that sold millions of records in the late 1980s. These are older men now; it is early 2003. You see beers and pale arms lifted straight up, and the people attached to those beers and pale arms are jumpy, excited, and happy.…
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Some say that it is possible to dry a spirit from the cold
if you bring it by a flame, urging here, with a warm mug
urging hold and stay awhile, but child, I don’t know.
When it comes to what it’s really like, we are left
bereft with feeble words, and there are limits, too,
when it comes; to what any one of these may hold,
what any constellation untold may know, at any time, no
matter how vast the reach of your intention, the spirit
in space grows cold until it coalesces restless among
others with enough mass and time to collapse into
matter hot enough to burn the birth of the last new
star, the one that looks like nothing now, and will…
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I became a party aide when I rented the tiny apartment in one corner of a palatial southern mansion, where local history buffs archived their records and held their meetings. I monitored the security system, took in the Historical Society’s mail and watered the outdoor potted plants. My living quarters were so small that I joked that I could clean the place by turning around once with a dust rag in each hand.
Shortly after I moved in, the administrator of the society decided to offer the house and its lovely gardens as a venue for weddings, teas, and other elegant affairs. A Historical Society member was paid a small honorarium to be present, helpful, and watchful at each event. I filled that role. I contributed my small fee back to the organization and relished having the run of the entire home and a unique vantage point for people watching.…
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The journey took more than four hours. Crammed to the gunnels with more than a hundred people, the old fishing boat was slow. As it fought the currents, the engine could do little more than growl. Any wave caused it to shudder, as if it were afraid of the water. Wedged between two men and a woman with a baby on her lap, I couldn’t move an inch. I grabbed hold of my amulet and closed my eyes. Some people had thrown up inside the boat; others had urinated and defecated wherever they could. If we hadn’t been up on deck, lashed by the wind, the smell would have become unbearable. But nobody said a word. Whether it was because we were dreaming of a new life in Europe, or because we were petrified of drowning, we were silent.…
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