There is a long, barren highway connecting the coastal town of San Marco to the farmland. In the morning, trucks full of produce, dead animals and supplies travel south, bringing provisions to the city’s restaurants and markets. There is a gap in the highway’s guardrails where an unpaved path runs through. Kissing that unpaved path, on a slim stretch of grass, is the home of Mrs. Archimedes.
I used to work in San Marco washing dishes at a seafood shack. The fishermen would sell their haul to the owner and spend the day trading stories at weathered picnic tables, trying to entice me with drinks and company when I came out to clear their plates. They’d offer to show me the nightlife after work, and I’d stay in the kitchen until they lost their patience.…
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The four boys stood on the concrete former pontoon outlined by the mountains or hills on the horizon. I couldn’t tell you which they were from my position on the beach. Surrounding them, sat at their feet, were other young men and women. But the four boys who stood tall above the rest seemed to be in a group of their own. While the others occasionally jumped into the sea that was garishly sprinkled with diamonds of the type you’d find decorating the cheap bags on Avenue Guy de Maupassant, the boys fought.
Though mainly just shadows and outlines in the heat of the midday sun, I could see a tall one, a fat one, a shorter one and a fourth of normal size for a 13 or 14 year old.…
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I met a man fresh out of prison once. I was in a bar downtown round midnight. He walked in and ordered a scotch, then another. I didn’t say anything, but I could tell he wanted to talk. You don’t walk into a bar alone to avoid people.
He got to reminiscing before too long. At first he wasn’t talking to anybody in particular, then he started looking at me, then before too long I was the only one he saw.
He told me he’d been in prison five years, but not to worry because he was innocent. Most people inside are innocent, he said – except, of course, the ones that aren’t.
Most of what he said, though, had to do with wrists. He told me people never rub their wrists when the cuffs come off, when they’re thrown in the cells or leaving the system. …
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Lenny let another rock fly from his slingshot toward the ancient weeping willow just on the other side of the fence. A flurry of little songbirds took to the sky.
Lenny used to be fun, but now all he wanted to do was shoot things. Through the kitchen window, Maribel could see her mother with the coffee pot and Lenny’s mom holding up her cup. She wished they would hurry up.
“Aren’t you scared you’ll hit an angel?” Maribel asked. “I saw a picture in the paper of an angel that got shot by a hunter.”
Lenny lowered his shooting arm and turned to face her. “My dad said that picture was fake. And anyway, I’ve never seen an angel around here.” He scanned the yard looking for his next rock.…
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I’m minding my own business when I walk right into the path of my double—my own doppelgänger.
Everyone is supposed to have one, you know. And mine, well, I’m a little disappointed that she isn’t as pretty as I like to think I am. She has some flaws, and they’re obvious right away. Her nose is a little bit offline, for one thing. And she’s wearing red cat-eye glasses—I wear contacts—that sit a little bit crooked on that crooked nose. She’s also dressed with no style whatsoever, not at all rocking the saggy brown wool coat, in my opinion, and the thrift-shop flowered blouse. Her jeans are threadbare. Her hair is a bird’s nest of frizzy Miss Clairol Shimmering Sands Blonde.
We look at each other.…
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Summers mean walking
every morning, listening to pink and orange
music as the drifting turns into waking.
I see dead birds along the sidewalks morning to morning and think of…
I think differently now, I acknowledge the birds and say my internal prayer
and thank them.
One morning I take an egg from the sidewalk
abandoned, rested on my desk for a week
only to explode while on the phone with a friend.
…………….The windows are down in the still-daylight summer evening and as I make my turns to downtown – teens walking alone/in pairs along the reaches of the sidewalk streets—I see the flashes of lightning in the blue in between rooftops like flashlights
…………….beneath the skin.
…………….With my windows down,
…………….…
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A quiet stairway at summer camp. The scent of redwood trees. We sat on the steps and talked. We discovered each other the night before. That next day, we blew off all the camp activities and spent the day together.
We laughed at each other’s stories. Your voice was soft and low; your eyes younger yet wiser than mine.
We lived too far away from one another to really make a go of it, but we tried anyway. Far from the days of algorithms and the forever-instant-now, we exchanged addresses and promised to write. I wrote to you in my tortured grade school cursive; you wrote back in clean, smooth lines.
All the letters from you I kept snug in a paperboard box. I crave to read them now.…
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