Henry was stopped in traffic, headed to an early-morning doctor’s appointment, when the red MG popped out of a side street and passed him, city-bound.
The car was lipstick red, husky-voiced. The driver wore dark bubbles of Hollywood sunglasses, a blue blazer, and a bold red macho-striped shirt open at the throat. A thick shock of white hair crowned him in a sun-drenched halo.
Early in his college years, Henry had yearned for a red MG. Craved. Coveted. A Ferrari or Porsche might have been even better, but he had no hope of affording more than an MG, and not much hope of even that. In fact, he drove a third-hand Jeep of World War II vintage. Courted Mabel in that ancient vehicle, until she gave him an ultimatum: find a conventional sedan that offered some protection against upstate New York winters, or find a new girlfriend.…
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Walter Whitstable catches a flight on short notice the day before the opening of the city’s music awards ceremony. After a half-hour, the plane starts coming in to land at an awkward descent. Walter pulls his sleeping mask over his face and begins humming along to Fern Kinney’s sole hit from her youth; lyrics that speak to him of what once was – to a calming effect. As a subject of an article titled One-hit Wonder Whitstable, Walter feels he’s been poorly represented. Slanderous little shits he thought…yes, he often felt like this about the press. For Walter, the invitation to present at the awards ceremony meant opportunity, exposure, and a return to centre stage; Jimmy Osmond had pulled out last minute for unknown reasons and Walter was asked to step in.…
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I was walking north on Columbus Avenue looking at a woman walking south whose face struck me as somewhat peculiar—wild hair, platinum dye, stern joyless expression—and registering that the peculiar face was itself regarding my own with the same measure of scrutiny if not befuddlement. One encounters this kind of situation in New York City with sufficient regularity to ignore its over-or-under-tones and continue walking on without seeking clarification, which is exactly what I did. About three steps past the woman I heard, “Hey!” which stimulated my ignore button further. Then “Hey!” again, this time more insistently and followed by my name.
Reluctantly I turned, and as I’d feared, it was the peculiar-looking woman.
She said, “You just walk right past like you don’t even know me?”…
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One day, a small tiger mosquito crawled onto my mother’s skin, possibly from the bully bay, the muhly grass, or just dropped in from the night sky and pierced her, taking her blood in tiny droplets and exchanging it for Yellow Fever.
It’s said that the fever started in East Africa somewhere and passed from land to sea, sea to land, person to person. Eventually, one mosquito in a long lineage of short-lived ancestry reached St. Augustine, Florida, and passed on this small dark gift to my mother.
March 26, 1929
The Florida sun pulled itself over the horizon and caromed off the gaps in the wind-bounced palm fronds in the front yard. I can’t remember the last time I spent all night out. I put one hand on the doorframe and the culmination of the night’s adventures peeled tocsin through the front of my head to the back of my ears.…
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Molly’s paper dress crackles. The stiff, waxy material creates white looming cliffs and shadowed valleys, and she explores them with her fingers, reading the anatomy charts on the wall. The Muscular System. Personal Hygiene. Silky streams of cold air snake around her arms.
“Molly! How’re you doing?”
Molly jerks her back straight, glasses falling down her nose. She turns the corners of her mouth up, giving the doctor her polite, one-word answer.
The doctor shakes her hand and settles into her round of questions. Yes, she eats regularly. No, she hasn’t felt any odd pains. No, she hasn’t started her period. She hopes she never has to. Her head starts hurting; the office is so cold.
A flashlight shines into her eyes, nose and throat; a hammer taps her knee. …
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J.D. Onely lost his left leg in 1956. He remembered where and when, but not how. It was in the violent, sadistic heat of a Georgia summer day, and he was riding his daddy’s tractor down the main road. J.D. was a tad drunk, not much, really. His daddy kept the real liquor hidden, and J.D. could only find his mother’s bottle of rum, hidden behind the cleaning things, under the kitchen sink. He took a swig, then a second, and then a gullet-full of third, and then he hopped on the tractor to head to the fields. The burn in his gut and the sun on his head made him feel like a fever.
J.D. never knew what hit him or what he hit, and he woke up in the hospital, bandaged to the eyeballs, with one leg in traction and the other one growing greener and greener.…
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My friend did not have enough money for a broom. He only had a dollar fifty. A broom was four dollars. He needed the broom because he wanted to sweep the dead bugs off his floor. Bugs had a silly habit of dying in the middle of my friend’s room and staying there until somebody did something about it. My friend did not want to pick up the dead bugs even if they were wrapped in a tissue. That was still too close to the dead bugs for his liking. A broom was a good tool for dead bugs. With a broom he could get rid of the bugs while staying sufficiently distant from them. He could pretend that he and the dead bugs resided on separate planes of existence.…
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