The Bookends Review

– Edward Lee…

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I open my eyes very slowly, as if emerging from a storm cellar after the tornado. A cluster of people peers down at me. A young woman carefully tucks her purse beneath my head. I see her lips are moving and am reminded of the adult voices in a Peanuts cartoon. I try to laugh but this alarms the crowd gathered around me. The young woman shakes her head and gently pushes my chest to keep me supine. With closed eyes, the deprivation of sight enhances my hearing. Children laughing, rhythmic chanting from the Hari Krishnas, the chug of a small train. Central Park.

I remember now, standing in line to buy a lemonade. A handsome young man talking. Flattered. It’s been so long since a man talked to me.…

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1.
Till the end (there is no end)

2.
Scores of flying scissors cutting the air
above the rooftops and cathedral

3.
She is so much younger

4.
They leave (hidden behind the column her friend
had been only an audio and purse). We stay
and take their place (watching, sipping
our beers, crunching our snacks)

5.
The burning fish is dying a slow death behind the cathedral.
A last gasp of orange and black has taken the scissors
and the fish. Only the cathedral remains, drinking
imperfectly (perfectly) from the absent
moon

– R L Swihart…

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Asian massage spas: Four reasons to check them out

Anonymity. You will leave who you were on the pavement once inside the spa. You will be greeted by someone you never knew and will never know. “Hello Lady,” a woman will say. She will point to the menu. “What you want?” she will ask. An implicit agreement exists, namelessness and disregard. Some masseuses are taller than others, some are fatter, some are shorter, some are thinner, but they are all the same to clients, just like we are to them. My generic, pasty white body is indistinct from every other body that walks through the door.

Amy > Yelp review > Asian Massage Spa

Ugh! It was a new girl, and I tried to ask for the old girl, and they
just pushed me into the room.…

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The door snaps open and a woman steps into the café. Cold air rushes in as she stands in the doorway. She looks about thirty. She is attractive, freckled, fresh. She wears a mid-length calfskin coat, with a black flannel scarf around her neck. She pauses for a moment. Her cheeks are flushed from the cold, her eyes bright. She looks vigorous, nervy, alive.

She is my wife.

As she closes the door behind her, she tilts her head forward, her hair rolling over her shoulders. She catches it in her hands, then straightens. A barrette is in her mouth. She pulls her hair back and slips on the barrette to make a ponytail. She smiles to herself, then moves with confidence to an empty table.…

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We are all happier in many ways when we are old than when we are young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.
—Winston Churchill

When I’m in other peoples’ homes, I’m automatically drawn to their bookshelves. Books reveal a good deal about a person. Shelves full of Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy, James Patterson, and John Grisham logically suggest that their owners enjoy action, intrigue, murders, car bombings, and the challenge of solving crimes. We read for entertainment, information, and enlightenment. We read to learn what we need to learn about ourselves and our world.

Who has not wandered over to their own bookshelves and run their fingers across the spines, looking for just the right one—perhaps a volume remembered to hold epiphanies, comfort, lessons on the importance of forgiveness or the components of happiness?…

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Bill Campbell eased his eighty-year-old bones into the Victorian wingback chair just as someone began knocking on his front door. His favorite tobacco pipe rested just outside his reach on a side table. It was pledge drive month on Minnesota Public Radio–no pipe, no Beethoven, it would require an act of God’s divine mercy to hoist himself out of the chair and reverse the deviations to his morning liturgy. He patted the side pocket of his Harris Tweed, hoping to find a stowaway pipe, but it was empty.

All week construction crews had been jackhammering across the street at the state hospital. His windows rattled from the concussion and the noise jarred his serenity.  According to the newspaper, the hospital planned to move the patients closest to the construction site to another wing of the facility because of the noise.…

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