I’m going faster than the signs limit, but slower than the other cars barreling through the toll plaza. Before I even see it, a car is right up behind me, that’s how fast they’re going.
As soon as they’re past the concrete divider after the tollbooth, the car darts over to the right to pass me. But the lane to their right merges into their lane and that lane is occupied by a semitruck. The car is caught unaware and has to slam on their brakes. Then the lane now occupied by both the semi and too-fast car pours into my lane. I use this lane every day because the other lanes merge into it. My lane is the safest course through this bonkers toll plaza where everyone is in too much of a hurry.…
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Wild as myth, silent as fate
He is not king, nor knave,
Yet wild in hate,
Sances between them like smoke—
a riddle in the deck,
Keeps the enemies close and friends richer
Smiles with bare allegiance, raising the stakes
Painted in motley,
He wears chaos as if a crown,
a wildcard whispering:
Holding and beholding his own assertion
His miniature face on the marotte hails itself
Rules made in jest, it says, are threads to be cut.
Motions and stress of a fracturing surface.
Pretend solidarity and imitate love, he’s a solitary notion.…
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Now that they were gone he felt a little lost. Moving away had been an exciting adventure; but after that, then what?
It was wonderful, of course. They had the same things at home – pastries, coffee, cocktails, small plates – but they were so much better here. The flat white was available everywhere, but nowhere else had invented it.
Yet their being here had made it feel like home, and better than ever before. He had been content in a way he had not realised was missing. So now that they were gone he missed them, and felt worse than he did before.
The rain came from the sea over which they left. It illuminated the grey that the sun had obscured. It would have been better had they not come at all.…
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“Yes, you are in fact, dead. I know this can be hard to hear.” Death said with a compassionate smile “I can’t “help” you, but I like to offer one thing. Your last. I will show you your last. What would you like to see? Your last kiss? Your last talk with your mom? The last hug from your son?”
I looked into Death’s cold unmoving eyes with tears in mine. His eyes reflected what was in his heart, absolutely nothing. I suppose he wasn’t always this way, for his brain still knew what compassion means, which was evident by his offer, but millennia doing this job means a heart of stone.
My children had died many years prior, the first passed while fighting Chekhov’s war, the second dying from the nuclear fallout that soon followed.…
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Beneath the stark glare of a harsh bathroom bulb, he had no problem locating crow’s feet and frown lines and the three horizontals etched in his forehead. Red blotches and brown skin discolorations stood out like warning signs on a road under construction. But this was no work in progress. This was the canvas he was left with after sixty-three years of struggle, success and whatever it was that had come after that.
The feature that wasn’t as obvious visually, the thing that was more difficult to find, was that elusive element called dignity. Surely it was still there. It must be, he reasoned. Hidden behind the time and the mileage and the unrelenting belief that a man shouldn’t be judged by what he did, but rather by how well he did it. …
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In my retirement years I like to listen to music of the 70s when I attended graduate school at the University of Kansas. One morning in early July one song by James Taylor instantly evoked memories of growing up in El Paso. It was the song, Mexico, from Taylor’s album, Gorilla, whichI particularly liked, because it reminded me of that summer I spent in Mexico between my junior and senior years of high school. The lyrics are whimsical and joyful, with a catchy Mexican beat.
Oh, down in Mexico
I never really been so I don’t really know
Oh, Mexico
I guess I’ll have to go
Oh, Mexico
In the summer of ’62 I applied for a summer program to build friendships between El Paso and the small village of Río Florido.…
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The prow of the boat faced black water while the divers found their traps in the wet cold, the howl of their lights breaking windy waves. Jim Carter turned west, away from that hum, past the scratchy-roped buoys and into moon-bright waves, to drop the body: its smell like wasted soil, the dead flower scent of rotting water greened with slime.
The doctor’s anxious hairy arms had waved money at Jim like feed for seagulls, frantic. “Take this, take it, take anything.” Why did a doctor, barely breathing, prone to asthma, twitching into an inhaler, want his wife heaved over a boat?
“Just bury her,” Jim had protested, matter-of-factly. “That’s probably the easiest, ground still soft with spring and summer’s warming coming.”
“I can’t,” the doctor mouthed, between the inhales, gaunt as a ghost, breathing white nothing air, his inhaler back to his mouth.…
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