“What do you think my mother was like?” your son asks you as a woman skates by with
her family.
It’s a June day, a sweltering June day where your ice cream doesn’t have any refuge
beneath the surprisingly green leaves at the park. There you are, your adopted son and
you, he and his questions about his biological mother, and you are unsure of an answer.
You can’t tell him what you want to say, the probable and the cold, and you start to sweat
at the beat of the question he keeps pushing, questions you wish didn’t exist. No answer
is ever completely right, and you want to say what you know: she was young and still in
school, got knocked up, and put your son up for adoption, and you know it isn’t pleasant,
so you freak mentally on the inside, the way any parent does when it comes to a first
broken bone, a first epidemic such as the chicken pox, and when he asks why his dinky
gets hard when he looks at girls.…
...continue reading
I.
And I watch as she lets the cold needle bite through a watery translucent skin. Filmy
sweet sugar-spun veins lace oxygen through her wasted female frame in a skittering
false pulse pumping this jovial child alive. In my lap she’s a ruined doll.
Cold damp hands clutch at my arm. Scarlet hair’s spilling against my jacket. Her eyes fall
back just as she does, leaning, leaning, letting the soiled rush seep, cocooning round her a
secondary self. I’ve got her cradled in my arms, cooing softly as she takes those first steps
through dual afterworlds, flowering and burning.
I’m not writing about addiction.
I’m just trying to pour the damp night through a bottle, captured, a petty romantic’s
reverie to send careening down an abyss so deep I might realize regret—but that’s a bluff.…
...continue reading
After Scotty Dockery’s funeral his sister went around telling everybody he went to a
better place.
When she got to us Ronnie-Ann held her off with her sunglasses and cigarettes. “If he
wanted a better place he could’ve gone to Portland,” she said.
“But there he was at Cattleman’s every day for happy hour croaky,” she said like she
blamed Ronnie-Ann.
Ronnie-Ann’s aunt looked way off and said when she was little he told her heaven’s
streets were paved with baseballs.
She said she told him that didn’t sound like heaven and he said the way he understood
it the streets could be whatever you want and it seemed weird to her the same street
could be different things for different people and at the same time.…
...continue reading
There was a town where bombs did not fall.
There was a crooked street and very narrow, where centuries of crooked rain dug trenches
in the cobblestone. Legend has it that if a woman steps in those trenches, she is sure to
marry in town. There were, in the town square, weft and warp loom vestiges of hands that
beamed spinning all those silky wool centuries.
There were two pigeons mating for life in alabaster and Katzenjammer.…
...continue reading
1. There is no off-season for purchasing tickets to and from South Florida. Your
mother will suggest you pay with your credit card and that she will reimburse you.
Sometimes she does, and sometimes she doesn’t. You always get seated next to
chatty President Taft look-alikes. You imagine them naked and stuck in bathtubs.
2. You don’t realize how easy it is to leave your friends, until the weekly phone calls
become monthly liked Facebook statuses.
3. In college, you will try singing for the first time. You find that you are a decent
singer. You never get any leads in the musicals, but you don’t care much for weeks
of long rehearsals, anyway, and so you enroll in a musical theater course. You will
send your high school sweetheart a video of your first recital.…
...continue reading
He knelt by the pool, gazing at its calm surface. Why? Why did the man staring back at
him seem so much better than he was? How was it that appearances could so easily deceive? He
ran a hand along his cheek, his mirror image copying the motion.
Everything was so much easier, so much better, when only the surface was visible. In that
world, he was nearly perfect. Young, handsome, confident, wealthy. It was all apparent with just
one glance—one quick look was all that was needed to characterize a person. They would see a
charming smile, a trustworthy face, and if they never saw him again, that was all he would ever
be to them.
Why couldn’t he be all that?
The complexity inside him corrupted all of it.…
...continue reading
No author can ever convince you a character exists. They describe a shell; a woman, for
arguments sake. She’s taller than you, and sees the world from a different angle.
Something might look round, but she could tell you it’s really square from up top. She
wears glasses, whichhelp her see that this thing is square, and her glasses, too, have
square frames. But there are other things about her besides her poor eyesight boxed
by thick, black plastic.
She lost a child once. A child that she didn’t want to have, but she can tell you where it
would have gone to school and what its name would have been, (she picked a name that
was deliberately unisex). The father wasn’t a very nice man, and she never wanted to see
him again.…
...continue reading