We get out of Donna’s glossy midnight-blue BMW. The air is filled with spikes. It’s not supposed to be cold in the tropics but tonight is special. We’ve finally done what we’ve been threatening to do since we were teenagers. Poor Anwar. He’s just the in-between person in this, if you ask me, but the judge will say he’s the victim and the cause.
Donna lifts the cradle out of the back seat and throws it against a large dark tree. “That’s what you get for forgetting your roots,” she says, softer than I’d expected. I saunter towards the tree, spit into the cradle and bless it three times with my open palm.
“You know, I never trusted him.” Donna raises her hands and dusts it in the cool air.…
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I think the Monster is in love with me. Ever since it arrived in the city, it’s been following me everywhere. When I go for a run in the park, it jumps out from behind a bush and runs after me. When I get home from work, it’s there at the front door waiting for me. I’m not sure how to deal with this situation. No one else seems to think it is a problem.
“It’s actually kind of cute,” My friend Laura says.
”It’s not cute, it’s horrible,”
“Admit it, you kind of like it.”
“I don’t.”
Truthfully, so few people love me it’s hard not to feel grateful to whoever does, even if it happens to be something that – quite literally – has escaped from hell.…
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The contributions of singular individuals to human history vary both in degree and visibility. The vast majority leave no substantial impact at all, beyond the confines of their little spheres of influence, their little families, their little communities, their little speck of dirt on a bigger speck of dirt in a bigger vacuum in the bigger Mind of God. Such a life is by no means pointless. Spiritual nobility is a state of the soul that anyone can achieve. A few rewrite the trajectory of civilization in a way that cements their legacy as Great, so long as the successive generations maintain and transmit the stories of their Greatness. However, there are a few whose impact is just as significant, but they operate completely in the shadows (whether by choice or fate), receiving no recognition at all.…
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“You can’t just force someone to connect with you, Poppy.” Mimi doesn’t smile at the trays of macarons and seri muka as she usually does. The least she can do is pretend.
Poppy appreciates Mimi’s on-the-dot arrival every Sunday at three in the afternoon but does she really need to say it out loud in order to earn a smile from her friend of five years? Isn’t it enough for Mimi to quietly know that her presence means Poppy can finally open her mouth and speak after a full week of zipping herself up, doing housework and work at the office studiously, like a good woman? Being with Mimi means she can drop that nonsense and complain freely about her inability to connect with her husband.…
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A soft orange light, 2:43 AM, glows amongst the darkness you know to be your room. You squint, trying to make sense of the time. You calculate how many hours you have until your morning alarm is set to chime. Two hours and Twenty minutes. You have been having trouble sleeping through the night because every night you wake up craving eggs and cheese. It’s an immense craving, like wanting cold water after running a 5K. Your mouth is dry and your hair line dripping with sweat. Your body is begging for eggs and cheese. Not just any egg,
a boiled one,
with a slightly soft yolk,
as orange and yellow as a sunflower,
sprinkled with everything bagel seasoning.
Not just any cheese, soft chunks of cheese:
Original Babybel,
Light Laughing Cow,
Aldis Brie,
Cheddar Jack Cracker Barrel Cubes.…
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You could breathe the taste, and Petey Garrick inhaled it. It was a once-a-year pleasure, the balmy, thick-butter scent of fried batter and the sugar smells that glistened on it like morning dew, powdered on the Oreos and funnel cakes, baked into the elephant ears and waffle cones. The whispers, too, might have had that same decadence if only ingestible. Two little kids in line ahead of Petey, waiting for corn dogs, murmured about some great thing. And these magnanimous rumors travelled on the candied atmosphere of the Morgan County Fair, walking like tightrope acrobats across this low, confectious fog to Petey’s ears with a single spell at their end: fortune-telling.
“Excuse me,” Petey ventured to the two children in front of him. One was a small boy, maybe just three feet from the ground, wearing thick black glasses that monopolized his face and blew up his brown irises like a cartoon.…
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Tommy Two Bears called it “counting coup.” His uncle Joe LeDoux called it attempted suicide.
Me and Joe were with Tommy the first time he did it. It was late ’94. The three of us had been to Rapid City picking up a satellite dish for old Clarence Short Bull. We were headed out of town on 44 when we come up on this bar called the Shuffle Inn. “Let’s stop in for a quick one,” Tommy says. “I’ll buy.”
It wasn’t the kind of place that would roll out the red carpet for our sort. The lot was full of F250s, Silverados, and Dodge Rams jacked up high enough to ford the Missouri. And they had gun racks and bumper stickers like MY WIFE YES, MY DOG MAYBE, MY GUN NEVER.…
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