The moving truck is angled backwards in the driveway, and the “For Sale” sign sways a few feet from the blood red X someone spray-painted in our yard. Our house is hollowed out, its insides packed thick and sloppy in the truck. The love seat is inverted on the sofa, and the kitchen table stands flush against the side. Bags of clothes, lampshades, and boxes of toys are seated in stacked chairs. There’s bed mattresses and chipped picture frames. Old books and older bookshelves. Porcelain whatnots wrapped in a month’s worth of sports section.
The wind blows the sign over and I set it back up. Drive it six inches in the ground and look at the large X.
I step inside. What’s left of the boxes, mostly dishes and photo albums, are scattered around the living room floor. …
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Sam Carranza wasn’t at the San Bernard library to escape the heat or read the papers. He was looking for a man. Sam had a picture, taken years earlier. It showed a spry sixty-something with a mop of white hair and clear blue eyes. Thadée Molyneux would have been a good fit for the elderly set that perused publications in the library lounge, but he wasn’t among them.
Molyneux had dementia. He absconded from the retirement home where Bella, his daughter, had put him. Bella, teary-eyed, told Sam the police had called it quits. It was end July in heat-hammered West Texas. Molyneux might have fallen in a ditch, encountered a rattler, or a two-legged predator. The cops gave Bella Sam’s number. Maybe he could help, and his fee was reasonable.…
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Go forward, up the long sloping hill of heat-baked, late afternoon sidewalk, besides two car lanes split by lush traffic islands—toward the dizzying summit. Then stagger over into another world beyond.
For this Santa Valeria neighborhood holds Southern California homes of casual wealth and quiet opulence. Not the garish, built-up mansions near the Mission, nor the sprawling, mostly dark estates embedded high in the foothills that semicircle the downtown grid.
She knows these houses belong to the every day rich, who drive their own cars, buy groceries, and live their own life—to the extent that they possess one.
“Gabriela? Oh my god, that’s so lovely.” Young married women, her employers have told her this. Jealous, saddled with names like Alexis or Skyler or Jen. One even said, “I wish it was my name, but friends would call me Gabby.…
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Ling comes back from the bar with another Four Roses for me. “That bartender is busier than a one-armed paper hanger,” he says, then looks for my reaction, which is part of the lesson for him. “What does it mean?”
It’s Tuesday night so I’m in the West Gate answering Ling’s questions about English he’s heard watching TV shows and movies. I’ve learned that some lessons are more enjoyably taught under the influence, so we’ve worked it out that Ling pays me in drinks.
Ling’s in his 30s but looks like a teenager: hairless face, moussed hair, and excitement about what the world has to offer. He isn’t a paying student at the English center where I work, but they let him hang around because he contributes to the English environment, which means he talks to other students in English and never uses Chinese.…
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On a rainy Saturday morning, the orchid Suna had been growing for the past few months pulled itself free from its pot, shook off the excess dirt, and declared that it was leaving now.
“Have at it,” Suna said from her spot behind the counter. She didn’t look up from her botany magazine. She thought the plant should have been gone at least three weeks ago and she was glad to be rid of it.
The orchid opened the door and walked right out into the rain, its head turned up to gather the water between its petals. Suna put the pot and its dirt into the compost pile. Whatever would grow from it next wouldn’t be any good and she wanted to save herself the headache.…
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The stone floor is cold against her legs. Her thin dress, worn the entire summer, can’t keep the damp out. It sponges moisture out of the stones. For the first month, this bothered her, now she only notices at night when she stares at the small patch of moonlight on the floor, trying to sleep. No one visits. Her cell door is opened at mealtimes, a metal plate shoved in, the stone floor scratching against the bottom. She’s long stopped listening to the prison’s noises: doors slamming, boots stomping, rats scurrying in the walls. They’ve faded into the background.
She is alone in the stone room; everyone was too afraid to share a cell with her. The guards finally found a cell in the old, unused part of the prison.…
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I wasn’t in love with him, yet. But he gave me that odd little fridge buzz, somewhere inside me – in more than one place inside me, in fact – that made me aware that love was a possibility. That feeling that one’s heart has been replaced with a Victorian mechanical replica; one that still works perfectly well, but now emanates a steady metallic slapping of gears, coarse but warm like beetle wings, sometimes louder, sometimes softer.
I wasn’t in love with him, yet, although my compulsion to invite him to every conceivable non-date activity that I could – anything other than an actual date, naturally – and the icy, terrified delight each meeting brought me suggested that perhaps I was. I couldn’t be, though: we hadn’t even been on a proper date.…
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