I can’t keep saying what everyone wants to hear, that I have bad days but basically everything’s okay. Things are not okay. I pretend I care only to avoid the fallout of admitting what I actually think and feel. If I said how I truly feel I’d be an outcast or end up having to endlessly justify why I’m so insensitive. My wariness of being found out runs so deep I can’t imagine life without it. All the precautions, the second-guessing, just so I can open my mouth and say, How are you doing today? and give the appearance of someone who gives a shit. I probably did at one time, way back. Where that part of me went I don’t know. Needing to keep up appearances has flattened any honest sentiment. …
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‘I would love to be able to be in the bathroom alone’ I remember musing
when she was small and always in my arms and on my hip that first July in the yellow house.
Those days went by so fast and while my lens was wide open and all I have now are blurred
images
of seedless green grapes cut in small pieces on a tray,
a blue kiddie pool with cold water left out on a summer morning to warm in the sun under a
cotton clothesline as I held her and hung laundry with wooden clips, while baby frogs on the side
of the garage hopped under a leaky brass garden hose spigot into moss below
and onto the meandering slate path
that kept fleeting prints
of their small
wet feet
that evaporated
into mist.…
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We were so bored in high school in 1978 that we very nearly threw a kid in the bonfire at Homecoming. We had nothing in particular against him; he was just tall and gangly like the rest of us but unlike the rest of us, he hung out with girls: homely girls, girls from our neighborhood, ones we called dogs. This made him an easy target. I didn’t like pursuing him, didn’t like calling him pussy and sissy and such but it couldn’t be helped, I thought, because I certainly didn’t want the rest of the pack chasing after me.
The rest of the pack: a gang of virginal boys dreaming of becoming otherwise, dreaming of dates with magnificent girls who would quietly disrobe and ruin us.…
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I
At the end of my year’s commitment as an anti-poverty worker, I couldn’t decide what to do next, so I re-upped.
In the southern Appalachians, where I served, levels of education were low and substandard housing high. Textile mills, subsistence farming, and minimum-wage support industries constituted the job base. Most of the individuals joining Volunteers in Service to America had finished college, and those without degrees had gone to college for two or three years. The majority came from the Northeast, Midwest, or West Coast. Whereas the locals ate white bread, grits, and sweet iced tea, the VISTAs ate bagels, hash browns, and hot herbal tea. They all drank Pabst Blue Ribbon. Most folks we encountered believed in the inferiority of Black people and the biblical version of creation.…
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Morning was the better time. She lit the match, touching the flame to the small candle’s wick, and it took, wriggling with new glow. Since Max’s death last year, Sarah kept a collection of his belongings gathered around the candle – his watch, wallet, phone, the pen found in the pocket of his jeans. She added his favorite Matchbox cars, Pokemon cards, an old school pencil whose eraser was worn down to its nub. Every morning, as the grim winter sky emerged from the night’s darkness, she went to her candle, sat with her son’s things. She did not pray. She sat in silence and attempted to quiet her mind.
She put on a yoga video, did a quick session, rising up in sun salutation, the highlight of her day.…
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The moon was pink.
Violet clouds engulfed its dim shadow and enveloped the castle around her, its karahafu scarlet and stacked above walls of mahogany stockades.
As she strolled down its hall, wooden planks crackling under her feet, she could feel her kimono flap in the wisps of breeze. Pink petals of the sakura trees beside her landed onto the silvery river around the castle, then coasted down the clouds into a world where they became rain.
At the end of the hallway, she stopped. Before her was a shoji, paper door, that would lead her into a room overlooking the city. The door slid open, and a silver-haired man peeked out and beckoned her in, his withered fingers trembling in the air.
“She has returned home,” he cried aloud, turning back to the swarming clusters of people in front of the castle, their heads canted up at the room.…
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You slip between my fingers, crumbling to dust on the way down. Your teeth sink into the wedding ring you paid too much for. Unkempt hair gets caught up in the air like how Christians imagine they’ll float up during the rapture.
You were fourteen years my senior, the one thing about us that never changed. We met at the Borders in my college town no more than a month before it closed forever. The building was bought by a televangelist and is now a megachurch. I hear you can make more money off salvation than books nowadays.
We spent the day we met wandering the bookstore, conversing about our favorite authors. During a tangent sandwiched between discussions about Chabon and Hosseini, you asked me out for drinks.…
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