“Men-men, honey, you have to stop!” Hume yelled. He took a few steps toward his wife, lifting his polished shoes high and placing them in the remaining grass-covered spots in the yard.
“Men-men!” he yelled from his grassy plateau, the lines in his forehead fissuring deeper.
Hume knelt on the ground, holding his hand to his princess, his beloved, his dirt-stained wife. “Men-men, pleeeease…please come up out of there,” he pleaded to his wife, her head level with his feet as she stood in her pit.
Spraying her white dress with loose dirt, Men-men tossed a billowing shovel load to a pile of earth’s layers behind her.
“Erimentha!” Hume yelled, punctuating each syllable with the staccato of the summer cicada.
Red-faced and smiling, Men-men looked up, smearing mud across her cheek as she pushed hair from her face. …
...continue reading
Watch for her from across the street, making sure to steal glances from underneath the rim of your baseball cap. You don’t want to stand out, so you wear a Red Sox one, just like your dad used to have. Wait beside the pretzel kiosk and look casual. If you buy a pretzel, it will look more authentic. As you rip open the mustard packet with your teeth and spit the hard plastic corner onto the sidewalk, smirk at all the people rushing home, trying to avoid the rain, failing miserably. Become a backdrop to the human traffic, scurrying across the pavement like roaches.
She finally steps out into the rain, wrapped in a smart wool coat, fumbling with her red umbrella, jerking the handle until it blooms out in front of her.…
...continue reading
An interviewer asked a famous writer: “How do you know what your characters are going to say?”
“Because they’ve already spoken,” she responded. “They’re real people and I’m just trying to remember what they said.”
“Then you aren’t really writing fiction?”
“I’m adding fiction to life,” the writer said, “making up a parallel world.”
“So much for your much-admired imagination,” the interviewer said.
(Pause)
“So, a famous writer was being interviewed,” the writer said in a somber voice, “by someone who kept questioning her methods and integrity. After putting up with it for as long as she could, the famous writer took a pistol from her purse and carefully shot the interviewer in his left eye.”
(Another pause)
“That’s not funny,” the interviewer said.
“Perhaps not,” the writer said, “but it’s not entirely fictional, either.”…
...continue reading
It was almost funny – the way his was flattened across the satin pillow that propped him up like a doll. Everything was so incredibly deflated, as if someone had hooked him up to an air pump, blown him up real big, and then forgot to tie up the holes so that the air leaked out– whistling out through the nose, leaking out between the tiny lines that encompassed the balls of his eyes, heaving out of his mouth to leave him deflated. His cheeks were like a giant whoopee cushion except with his ears jutting out at the sides, and headphones plugged in as if he was listening to a soundtrack we couldn’t hear.
Maybe that’s why I wasn’t sad.
It was all so odd.…
...continue reading
Randy’s wish
I’ve rented a motor boat for two hours. I’m in a maroon tee and bermuda shorts, waiting for Jane. The twilight is a tint of orange with threads of red rising from the horizon, which may not last long, unlike her presence that placates my soul.
I have known her for sometime, only know that she works for a store, but it’s enough data. Love, they say, is blind.
But I have a point to prove, and have long waited for this moment, like a poor Alaskan waiting for years to get to Florida, away from the sucker cold. Worse, I was treated like a pole a dog would lift its legs to pee on, and using the smell as a mark for other dogs to shame me and my competence.…
...continue reading
I believe you will turn toward me in the morning,
powered by an almighty need
to confirm I am still on this earth,
that what is seen and unseen still lives between us.
This is one thing I must have
the only thing that can trigger the day
that is begotten of our agreement.
You are the sun god of us,
the truth that turns the orbit
of being loved on this earth for me.
Through this love, I feel the warm rays of a brighter
salvation from afar,
come down from heaven,
by the power of you, through you,
incarnate in your arranging the blanket so my shoulders
are made warm.
For my sake, you brushed away the debts I owe you,
you suffered, but didn’t bury the pain of all those slights and insensitivities.…
...continue reading
LG 1967–2013
when I brought you into my country
everywhere I had gone became
the town or river of a child and
you renamed it to your own music
and you were singing even though I
had broken into the refrain and
would do so again on leaving the
one mild country of your tune and words
I could hear the music of the child
you used to be when we talked in June
and knew nothing would interrupt it
in your time or out not even this
– Rodney Nelson…
...continue reading