The ambient light goes out and laughter followed it. On the end table, the alarm clock glows at a quarter past three. His bedroom is pitch black without the television. He rolls over and looks at the darkness. The covers are thrown off him so he can get up. He pushes out the bed, finding his houseshoes by feet, and fists the handgun.
Garbage pick-up is today at daybreak. And after three weeks of procrastination, that sucker is full and it needs taken out. The trashcan does not have any more room for another lazy week. So he closes the backdoor behind him, triggering the floodlights. He walks through and beyond the garage to look up to find the night sky noticeably vacant. It is as if the moon and stars withdrew.…
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You can’t have sex today. It is the first thing you think when you wake up. It is heavy in the linings of your lungs as you stretch in your twin-sized bed closer towards him. Morning has been pouring into the room for hours and it is getting almost too late to stay in bed, but you stay. You are tired.
There’s no reason to keep him around if you can’t have sex with him, if he means nothing. But you argue, trace the bones down towards his wrist, and correct yourself. He means something; you just wish it was less. You curl into what the twin-sized bed has allowed you to call comfortable and his hand rubs up and down your thigh innocent enough for you to stay.…
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On my grandma’s last birthday, I brought her a scoop of vanilla ice cream. She told me to come back the next day with more ice cream, as I had forgotten her real birthday and celebrated a day too early. I knew for a fact that her birthday that year was on Christmas Day, as it had been every year since 1926. I blamed this episode on her worsening dementia. Regardless, I decided to try again the next day, with a hopeful scoop of ice cream and an even more hopeful attempt at convincing my geriatric grandmother that it was, in fact, her birthday. Four days later and many more naive scoops of ice cream later, I realized my grandmother’s dementia might have made her a genius.…
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is the title of the book my father
intends to write when he grows up.
It is a hoax, of course;
there will be no other stories
just three hundred and fifty pages
of encounters with the TSA
since 2001
and other, better men.
This is what I tell you
in a coffee shop on Wardour St.
It is one of several things I take for granted
that we already have in common.
You tell me your birthday,
Miami International Airport,
you are as much your father’s son as I am
all daughter.
– Zara Shams…
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I’ve never actually listened to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Nevertheless, the 1973 album made a lasting impression on me starting in the mid-90s. That’s when “MTV News” host Kurt Loder reported the music’s surprising synchronicity with the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
We were still on dial-up at this point. No one downloaded (much less streamed) albums and movies. With neither the music nor the film available to me, I simply marveled at the notion that two works—separated by decades—could be brought together by the happy, accidental discovery of a (probably stoned) fan.
Even now, with the internet at my fingertips, I have yet to test the Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz theory. I worry the reality will never match my childhood reverie.…
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shadows
slant our stage
actors
await their cues
the director
weaves
sleights of hand
innuendos
deceptions
lamentations
tales of unrequited loves
wars won lost
brewed with heartbreak
touches of joy
stirred violently
entrance of kings
close
long gray lines
plowing merciless fields
end
empty stage
old folks
sitting
in
sheds
w
a
i
t
i
n
g
– Ron Torrence
…
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A curtain shifts slightly to the right and a woman, freshly bathed, blond hair coiffed, a cigarette in her slim hand, watches a dark man walk slowly as if he has all the time in the world. He peers carefully into the garage of another residence, six houses away down the street. He looks at a couple of recently acquired antique cars that reek of paint. After he studies them for a long time, he gazes at the Mercedes parked on the next driveway. He continues walking and pauses to glance at a three-car garage, a new addition to what used to be a Colonial, but is now an elegant pillared residence. The raised garage door reveals a Saab and junk: wires and cables and boxes. …
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