In a morbid way he wished it were raining. It only seemed right that if he was mourning someone so beautiful, everything else breathing should too. The air, the earth, the sky, everything alive should be mourning with him. The sunshine that lightly warmed his perfectly black suit itched and angered him. Head bowed, the back of his neck was getting close to burning and the sunlight was mocking him. Mocking his pain. It’s a beautiful day to everyone else in the world, a day that people would never believe was full of loss. And sorrow.
Watching her rosewood coffin being lowered into the ground he contemplated sorrow. The lack of tears at such somber events was finally evident to his dry eyes. Simple loss flowed from widow’s eyes, but sorrow, true pain at losing this fallen person, couldn’t even be recognized here.…
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I moaned again about writing. We crossed into the park and he was saying it will be OK and I was saying I don’t know. A woman and baby sat at the fountain in the park. He said, why don’t you start over? I said, I already have a story. I don’t need a new one. The woman glanced around and removed the baby’s shirt. She dipped her hand into the silvery pool as water shot from the mouth of the ocean god above. Her baby waved his naked arms, and she lifted her hand from the pool. What rose from the water was the oldest vessel on earth, a cup pressed together by the hands of women thousands of years before. Her terracotta skin poured the cool liquid onto her baby, as if upon turned soil.…
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The town of Bastrop looked as if a fire-breathing dragon had careened above the twenty mile stretch of land, incinerating everything below. To his right and left, he saw thousands of blackened and jagged stumps and half-trees, trailing into the distance as far as his eyes could see. The ground below was sable earth and ash.
Jon tried to imagine the fire, the highway empty and hot, the sky bright and smoking from flames. Not a living soul within a mile, nothing to be heard but the crackling and whirring of an inferno. The loud and constant sound of nothing, because no living thing would hear it.
How long did this go on behind the livings’ eyes, he wondered. When did the fire finally die, satiated?…
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Blow wind, blow wind, blow my baby back to me.
Blow wind, blow wind, blow my baby back to me.
Well you know if I don’t soon find her, I will be in misery.
–”Blow Wind Blow,” McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters)
When the wind stopped, there was an eerie and sudden silence before debris began returning to Earth. Shower doors and 2 x 4s and spatulas and stuffed animals tumbled from the sky alongside terrified cats and dogs. And when the dazed residents began emerging from their bathtubs or hall closets or from under piles of scattered rubble, the horror was everywhere. Roofs pulled and tossed like playing cards, cars toppled over and piled like Lincoln Logs, second stories sliced from houses like layers from a cake.…
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At the bell, Nick and Marvin are walking unwillingly into the gymnasium. Colorful chairs are set up in neat rows. Most of the seats are already taken.
“Let’s squeeze in over there,” Nick says, pointing to an almost empty row.
Nick and Marvin met on the first day of high school. They met in an English class on the American canon. Nick really likes Salinger, but he prefers English writers. Nick writes, too. He writes long historical fictions about wars in other countries. Marvin doesn’t like to read or write, but is intrigued by Nick’s stories.
They squeeze into the row, trying to slide past people’s knees.
Then something happens.
An older boy grabs Marvin’s ass. He clenches on his ass cheek so tight that Marvin yelps.…
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I cannot stop licking picture frames. Wood frames, plastic frames, circular metallic frames, rectangular ceramic frames, leathery antiques, dusty collectibles, South American frames, frames with inspirational quotations inscribed on them, I want to lick them all.
On the night I met my ex-fiancée’s parents, her father walked into his study to find me mid-lick with a frame circumscribing a portrait of his ostensibly Confederate great-great-grandfather. I tried to apologize, but my tongue had got caught on a splinter.
My therapist tells me we all get to decide what it means to live A Happy Life. My priest disagrees. He says, “Even if Hitler had felt warm and fuzzy standing over the carnage of a concentration camp, he was not happy. Happiness is an objective state comprising the virtues that make us truly human.…
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The woman in front of me has an emerald green pea coat, so naturally I am back in
Ireland. He said driving on the wrong side of the road was no big deal, so long as it
wasn’t a narrow country road with a wide tractor puffing past. But we smoothed
everything over with thick beer, national radio stories about “those bad boys from Cork,”
and merry music at the pub that played all night.
It’s so humid and uncomfortable down here, and now I’m back in Costa Rica and our
jungle-side room with the light dusting of mold on the walls. “The parrots! The monkeys!
The green sideways-running lizards!” I told him on the plane, just before I napped on his
arm and he played with my hair.…
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