Carl Shikso squinted at the paper in front of him, gripping a ballpoint pen with such force his hand hurt. Topping six feet, even without his plaster-flecked work boots, he barely fit into one of several narrow spaces arrayed about the room, back to a line of increasingly irate people he pictured staring daggers at him much as he’d done countless times when stuck behind a slowpoke at Home Depot. The workday loomed and their impatience quickly gave way to hostility.
“Come ON, dude,” grumbled the owner of a gruff baritone seemingly to himself. “How hard can it be?” But Carl only half-noticed.
Spread around his ballot like a fan of mismatched cards was an assortment of political flyers. Congressional endorsements from pro-choice celebrities slipped into his pocket, most likely by his little sister Gwen. …
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I write stories, though nobody asks.
They come and I can’t help it.
I write a story about a girl…
In an old country, long ago, a girl is poor. Awkward, pubescent, alone. And likely bound for the convent, her family lacking means. But first to make sure it will do, a test. The girl must wash for the sisters, and what little she earns will help her family. As she works one day in the hot bright light, she is joined by an old nun. No, up close, she is still of middle age. The girl’s friends have always laughed at this lady—her flighty air, her whiskers. Her pointy beak of a nose! But as the girl works alongside the nun, discolored linens in the mangle, they discuss this girl’s sorry faith, all her doubts, her rage.…
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Old Fort, North Carolina after Helene
Nobody asked you to come back.
You told yourself it was just to see the damage.
Just to see what would finally break.
The jukebox is still there—half-buried in silt behind the diner.
The glass is splintered, and when you trace the web,
your finger pulls back grit and a smear of blood.
She laughed at something you said, and you pretended not to notice.
You think about touching it. You don’t.
You think about “Fingertips,” the little Motown scream.
Whose music gets to stay? The song still plays in your head.
It tastes like the metal of the gas station pump on your tongue.…
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In the years after Cameron Gordon died of a brain tumor, his sister Addie retreated to California, where she was in graduate school in comparative literature at Berkeley. She rarely came back to New York, usually only at the Christmas holidays. She had always been evasive and elusive. After Cameron’s death, she became more so.
At Berkeley, she got involved with a man who dominated her and alienated her from her friends. He was built like a fireplug with a muscled upper body. He had a German name, and our group of college friends referred to him among ourselves as “the Nazi.” I wondered if he were abusive to Addie, but I had no way of knowing, since we were barely in touch.
Eventually Addie broke up with him.…
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“My tank is gonna shoot,” Steve Emmerich says as he pushes a toy tank forward. A gargling cannon noise explodes from his pre-pubescent mouth. His fingertip traces a shot from the tank barrel to a toy truck. He flips the truck over and dumps five plastic soldiers onto the floor.
“Yer soldiers never miss,” Michael Augustine says. “That’s unrealistic.”
“Of course they never miss. Why would I have them miss? That’s stupid.”
The front door creaks shut below them. Steve hears his mother’s muffled voice say something. Light, rapid footsteps launch up the stairs. Definitely not his mother. The footsteps turn toward his room.
“You guys’ll never believe what I saw on my way over,” says Albion Winfrey, a boy of about the same age, who enters the room and plops down next to them.…
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Mariya maintained a fierce, pubescent annoyance. Mum! Shut up—it’s important! Her phone absorbed her long brown hair and green eyes.
You just zone out, staring into that thing, her mother Sofiy said. Here we are—I am the one buying you pretty clothes—but you’re off in another world. Are you looking at a new blouse and skirt on that? Or is whoever you’re texting going to buy you clothes? Since I’m about to leave you to stare at that damn thing all day and night—you wouldn’t realize I’m gone for at least an hour.
The girl’s mother’s extended arms—draped with white, red, and black garments—slumped, and with them the clothes fell to the woman’s waist-side in the boutique’s dressing room.
It takes like two seconds, c’mon! Mariya said with gritted teeth, hunched over her phone.…
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I thought I saw my old co-worker standing in line to get coffee
He was one of my favorite people, but I knew that when
I quit my job I would never see him again
Aside for the occasional post on Facebook
I smiled at him on my last day and acted as if it wasn’t a big deal to me
But it was a huge loss.
I looked at the man again and realized
That they looked nothing alike
Except for the wrinkles in his forehead
He used to talk to me through the partition of our cubicle
And got very excited about the littlest things
He would share his voicemails with me
And no one else
He worked with old people
Delivering books to the homebound
Knowing that someday they would be dead
So he saved the voicemails for as long as he had the space to do so…
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