Barry hated cell phones. He shuddered when trapped in a crowd, people yacking at maximum decibel, as if everyone within earshot was buzzed to hear about dysfunctional families or drunken golf outings. He detested camera phones, users blocking sidewalks, or rudely delaying meals to photograph the perfect tuna melt. He considered “selfies” an addiction for the self-obsessed. It saddened him when couples, heads tilted crotch-ward, abandoned human interaction in favor of text-talk. He’d scream “pay attention” at obtuse blockheads as they attempted to simultaneously type and walk.
But the biggest reason Barry hated them? They’d murdered his wife. Diana was headed downtown in her Toyota Prius when sixteen-year-old Becca Hughes, oblivious to the road while texting a friend, ran a stop sign and killed them both.…
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A man comes to town. He wears spit-shined shoes and a lime-green coat. His hair is all slicked, and there’s a pack on his shoulders. He looks bright and flashy, like a light bulb. I see him walking down the road, the noon sun sizzling on his head, with his feet raising little clouds of dust.
It’s a midsummer inferno outside, and all the windows in our house are open. I’m lying on the grass on our front lawn, Hector at my side, just lazing around. It’s too hot to think, much less do anything. Inside, somewhere in the dim swelter, mama’s cleaning pots and pans.
The man stops at a bakery window and looks in at a loaf baking in the oven. They have it on a rack in there, and it’s going around and around like a little white planet. …
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Oh, but the physicality of my thinking is chaotic. Outside of my apartment someone is walking up the stairs. I sometimes walk up those stairs and stumble. But I wasn’t always like this.
Nonono.
I’m gonna write the letter. I’m sorry for not knowing if I loved you. Because things get confusing and my mind’s fucked up. The tears don’t let me write. If what matters are my actions then I never loved you. But it’s the world—this fucked up world; like a mind-rape.
Right now someone is falling in love with someone that will never love them back. Someone just found out their mother has cancer. Someone is losing a job. Someone is killing a baby they never wanted. Someone is having sex at a bar.…
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Near the bridge, one leaves Jack’s Java.
Three blocks down, on the opposite side of Main, another exits Alma Books.
The two approach each other under a patchy sky, where blue tears whole swaths of winter from March. They notice: black hair wind-raised in a question mark, sunlight winking off a silver buckle, brown blazer, turned gaze, one’s loose gait, another’s briskness.
Passing cars interrupt the observations. Storefront windows darkly double them.
They appreciate. They dwell. There is much to like.
This could be fate.
One wants to stage an encounter, pretend a sudden street crossing is part of the afternoon’s agenda. But then what? How to bring about more than a nod, hello, and backward glance?
The other wonders the same, rapidly weighs which possession (phone, book, gloves) can suffer a timely plunge to the sidewalk and warrant a halt, exchange, closer inspection.…
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He did not want to see her and comforted himself with the thought that she did not want to see him either. It was too much!
It.
He did not want to think about that, so he thought about the summer of seventy-four or seventy-five instead, when they had both read The Great Gatsby and all summer long imagined themselves very bohemian, very 1920s avant-garde,people of affairs, perhaps, or at least people not shocked by affairs.
Yet for the Halloween party that year they did not dress as Jay and Daisy, or even Scott and Zelda, but chose Bonnie and Clyde because she had been seduced by Theodora Van Runkle’s costumes on Faye Dunaway’s flawless frame.
In particular, the beret.
He had gone along because he dug Warren Beatty. …
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My mind imagines, bleeds
ink for almost-profit in shades
of depravity most could not even begin
to conceive. I sleep
with scissors beneath my pillow
for sanity, sit with my back against walls,
always keep doors in view. I walk
my dogs, carry a Maglite
that has not worked in years
as a weapon, ready to strike at shadows.
I am a product of my own darkness.
The boogiemen whispering from closets
and corners wear nametags I gave them,
wait for dialogues I have yet to write.
– A.J. Huffman…
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It was a bitter cold December evening, and Officer Pierce wished he was home with his family. It was the holiday season, after all.
Soon he arrived at the scene, which had an ominously festive appearance. Blue and red lights flickered, reflected in the glass shards that covered the ground like a light dusting of snow. The crunch of his boots on the glass sounded like a stroll through a winter wonderland. But there was death here.
It was a dangerous corner, a turn that coincided with an intersection established long ago, when drivers heard hoof beats or the jingle of horse-drawn buggies, and paused, tipping hats and bidding good evening to neighbors they knew, not only by name or appearance, but by voice and words and deeds.…
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