Today I walked around the city with a white noise machine. Not an app played through headphones but a box, both futuristic and antediluvian, used during nights too loud or too silent to sleep. It ran on electricity so I snuck into my dad’s garage and took his generator, zipping it into a duffle bag and slotting my arms through the straps.
Then, I carried it around the city looking for you.
It rumbled against my spine, and I felt touched for the first time since your impression faded from that side of my bed. The soft whir distracted me from your high-rising, staccato accent, the one you explained as particular to your side of the Port. Despite the distance you traveled to arrive, were it not for the machine, I’d have heard you everywhere.…
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Efforts to locate next of kin had failed. Only the gravediggers and I stood in the ancient cemetery among the mounds of exhumed plots encircled by high-rise apartment buildings blocking the morning sun.
Otis murmured something about a skeleton crew. The others laughed and leaned on their shovels. I checked my watch—already a quarter after. The media would not be coming. I nodded to Otis. He climbed aboard the gravedigger, started its engine, and steered it over to the sunken rectangle. The claw descended and scooped up its first load of dirt.
Ten years ago, the Cremation Initiative had provoked fierce controversy. Exhumations were slow in the beginning until media attention declined, and the citizenry moved on to other concerns. A few grieving families made feeble protests, but disinterments proceeded at an ever-swifter pace, creating a boom for the cremation business, columbaria, and real estate companies, which scooped up the properties for development.…
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Act 1. You and me
Filets of trout perfectly browned in warm butter beside a quartered lemon slice on two Wedgewood plates. A carrot-sculpted rosette. Two glasses of rosé. Brown, yellow, blue, orange, red passion. “I’ll have iced tea; she’ll have water.” The server left us alone to hold hands in the flickering light of a candle, the shape of light caressing your face like breezes rustling a redbird’s feathers.
Act 2. Her
I just want someone. Why can’t I find someone? They come in here every week, sit at the same table, hold hands, never see me, see only each other, like I’m a distant noise, a car crash in some other neighborhood, a solar flare whose eruption won’t affect their climate-controlled environment, a damned iceberg calving, dissolving into the sea, disappearing into atoms small enough to be carried on the waves of their love sighs.…
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Mason Hamilton Williams was four and a half years old and it was a big long name and he could spell it all himself, Officer Jane Park had just learned.
“I kin even read. I told myself how to read when I was three and a half years old. Grownups didn’t tell me. I told myself. My teacher didn’t tell me. She told me the ABC’s but I already knewn that since I was two and a corter years old. The problem with grownups is. That they don’t listen. To the words.”
Officer Jane Park’s gaze drifted to the child’s light-up Paw Patrol sneakers thumping rhythmically against the metal legs of the chair. Under the bouncing feet a large coffee stain reposed on the dismal carpet.…
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Red is the glow of a bonfire burning low between stolen glances.
Red is a plastic cup filled with sour liquid that stings like a sunburn.
Red is the burn of cranberry vodka as it stains clean white porcelain.
Red is the hem of my sundress, pushed up around my waist.
“Red looks good on you,” he grunts into my hair, sticky with liquor and vomit. “Brunettes always look hot in red.”
Red is blood circling the drain, coiled like smoke from a fired gun.
I stare at the red nail polish still sitting on my bathroom counter. It’s the only red thing I own that I haven’t purged yet.
Red looks good on you.
“Your eyes look red,” my mother says over a plate of burned toast.…
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Izzy’s brow pushes up and she smiles. I made this for you, she says. She passes him a thin brown paper bag. The professional sleeve sort of bag with a smooth sheen.
Awesome, Jude says. The sleeve makes a crackling sound as he unfurrows it. He draws from it a parchment paper. The paper is thick and impressed with ink. Thank you, he says as he studies the parchment.
I did it in my printmaking class, she says. She cranes her neck forwards and nods. She was a sophomore in art school.
He’s not much older. It’s wonderful, he says, flicking on the dome light above to make sense of the lines, as he sits in the passenger seat of her parked car.
There’s like, boars, and they’re trying to eat the woman’s face.…
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Her favorite daydream puts her on the beach at sunset, her body slowly releasing the heat of a long afternoon. “This is how a clay pot must feel,” she tells herself. “When it is just released from the kiln.” And then she laughs, in her dream, an airy, lilting laugh that drifts slowly away across the incoming waves. Seagulls twist and arc in an impossibly blue sky, their aerial acrobatics set to some ballet music just outside the range of human hearing. They shorten into specks, then disappear, far out to sea, before materializing again in another segment of the horizon.
There is a dog, of course, for what is a daydream about the beach without some mongrel in need of grooming, dashing into the surf to rescue a broken stick? …
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