Or Just a Little Regret
In a moment of intimacy in a downtown hotel, lying on a bed with covers pushed to the floor, Vadim said to Tara, “Do you swim?” He lifted his hand from her belly as he spoke, feeling his shoulder ache slightly. Why should a man who was only thirty-seven have shoulder pain?
“A little,” she said, taking his hand and laying it back on her belly. “But I’m afraid of the water.” She liked Vadim, with his thick wild hair and his thick wild accent, and she wanted him to continue lying beside her, softly stroking her body as he murmured in Russian. Milochka he said. Whatever that meant, it sounded nice.
After making love twice, they sat nude by the huge window on the twentieth floor, with glasses of wine, looking down at the lights of Atlanta scattered across the dark sea of night.…
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I scrubbed bits of egg off a fork from my father’s uneaten breakfast before mother found out he failed to rinse the utensil before placing it in the sink. The sky outside the kitchen window was flat and gray, like a piece of spoiled meat. The air inside was oppressive and stifling, much like the rasp of my father’s breathing. His slippers shuffled against the carpet, and I heard the clank of a spoon against ceramic. Before I could volunteer to get the bowl, it hit the floor with a thud. Then his cough came on suddenly; violent and wet as though a tornado ripped through his lungs. I watched him from the entrance to the living room, my toes breaching the marble room divider he installed when I was in middle school. …
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Blossom curls
on the couch
…………paws
over her head
…………head tilted right
back twisted left
…………tail dangling
……………………over
……………………the edge
not very ladylike
she’ll sleep like that
…………for hours
me?
jealous of her spine
– Rebecca Dietrich…
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I saw the Plague Doctor three times before she came for me. The first time I was only a girl of two or three, mortality a vague pressure lurking over the next horizon, and so my father passed the Doctor off as a fun animal friend. The long beak, glass goggles, and large hat the accoutrements of an imposing but ultimately caring character from a book he had read as a child and swore that he had shared with me. The look of horror that my grandfather gave to my father at my grandmother’s funeral when I asked him whether he too liked the book about the Plague Doctor surely is a false memory, my adult disgust at my father’s strategy displaced onto another authority figure.…
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The devil sat staring out of the window of his second hand bookstore and prayed that if he did get any customers that morning they wouldn’t be one of those Trump supporting MAGA hat wearing American tourists he’d been seeing jostling for position to get into St Peter’s recently. Sweet Christ, the irony of it he groaned as he lit his first joint of the day. Black Spy Books was less well known for its reputation among high and low brow bibliophiles alike, as it was an excellent place to score top quality weed. The prince of darkness himself was a tidy looking man who many claimed to be the spitting image of T.S. Eliot. Checking his WhatsApp there were no messages. Cy/Cyr/Cyr’s timestamp read currently online, but then Cy/Cyr/Cyr was always online.…
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Many years ago, my mother took me to a museum to see dinosaurs for the first time. It was a last-minute thing. She called it a mother and son day. We’d never had one before. I was nine years old. That morning her blue eyes were puffy and red. Her face pale, drawn, preoccupied.
I was glad to get out of our house, away from my father. He was a snoring heap on the living room sofa when we left. Still wearing the same faded black t-shirt and grungy jeans as the day before. Cradling an empty Skol bottle in his tattooed forearms. He’d had one of those kinds of nights again. Only worse.
My mother and I stood before the colossal bones of Tyrannosaurus rex.…
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I stumbled on the broadcast by chance, a series of disjointed words on an army frequency nearly sixty years old. I was in the Library of Congress’ lab researching radio transmissions for my Master’s. Dusty records, military logs, and the faint smell of old paper surrounded me. I’d grown accustomed to the monotony of it all when the voice broke through the buzz and hiss: “This is Private Lars Holmgren, bravo 2 , 6 alpha . . . Charlie closing . . . need indirect . . . map grid—”
My breath caught. Private Lars Holmgren. That name was familiar—too familiar. My grandfather’s older brother. My mother’s uncle. She told me about him when I was a child. He was a dreamer, she said, the poet of the family.…
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