Parrots mate for life, I’m told. I don’t know how parrots show love, whether they crowd and peck, or groom and chatter with adoration. My parents pecked at each other in a partnership of endurance for most of their forty-five years together. My mother craved order, but my father loved a soiled nest, cluttering the house with newspapers, bus transfers, receipts, notes on napkins, Torah passages, and pamphlets from Jews for Jesus and Mary Baker Eddy. My mother forced him to take it all to a closet in the basement.
When we children had fledged and flown away, my parents sought new shelter. Their overheated one-bedroom in a subsidized high-rise, where the odors of curries and sofritos wafted through the hallways, offered no basement and no room for his clutter.…
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In keeping with its name, this meal gives a devilish dose of mayhem – until the aroma of forgiveness infuses every heart within the home.
Makes a family size serving
Total Time: Nineteen years to marinate and one night to complete
Ingredients:
- 1 spurned ex-daughter-in-law
- 1 bastard son who was unaware of his status
- 1 woman diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome
- 1 Mafioso lover who was also an ex-drug addict
- 1 loving husband who had a vasectomy
- 1 bad ass pastor
- 1 informed daughter
- 1 SWAT team
Preheat: To a steaming, sweltering, and scorching temperature
Combine: The blending of two or more food ingredients to create a mixture. He slashed girl’s faces for disrespecting him. He killed seven men. I was coerced through fear to engage in sexual relations with a man who claimed to be in the mafia and who had been clean from drugs for two months, a lethal combination.…
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I didn’t want to go that day, but my mother said we were lucky and had to give back. I was fine with just being lucky, but she was feeling all do-goody and dragged me to the church where they were handing out cleaning supplies and clothes and old people in World’s Best Grandma sweatshirts were drinking coffee and telling kids to keep it down. In the kitchen, a lady loaded our summer cooler with hot food coming off a big silver stove.
We were runners, she told us; our job was to deliver meals to the beach, where the storm had hit hardest. At the barricade, I thought it was cool when the National Guard checked off our names and waved us through, but my mother didn’t think it was a list you wanted to be on.…
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When you’re desperate, you’ll try anything once. So there I was, sitting in a folding chair around a table in a church basement with a bunch of alcoholics. I think every adult who’s been through the shitter and back has found themselves at an AA meeting at least once. Most of us don’t stay. We buck up, get jobs, pay our bills, and start drinking like adults again. I was in quite a bind though so I was trying this on for size. To ensure I sat through the whole meeting, I tagged along with a friend of mine who had been successful in the program. She was my ride home. I wasn’t going anywhere.
It seemed all right. I was jubilantly conversing with the other losers around the table when a shimmery faced granola girl in cotton shorts sat down beside me. …
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Rush hour traffic grinds to a halt at Lake and Bryant. Cold rain pelts the stopped cars, bikers, leashed dogs and one unmoving body heaped in the intersection draped in a purple cape; legs bent unnaturally back, broken eye-glasses inches from still hands, and silver hair bloodied. The purple now yielding to streaks of red. The paramedics’ frantic movements give way to a methodical loading of a dead body.
An elderly man leans against the ever changing stop light facing the accident. Rain floods his weary eyes, soaking his gray braided beard, his lips muttering “my other.”
“You OK? Looks like you’re sliding down the pole.” A tattooed twenty-something with a skate-board tucked under an arm says. “Let’s get you to the bench. There you go.”…
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“Men-men, honey, you have to stop!” Hume yelled. He took a few steps toward his wife, lifting his polished shoes high and placing them in the remaining grass-covered spots in the yard.
“Men-men!” he yelled from his grassy plateau, the lines in his forehead fissuring deeper.
Hume knelt on the ground, holding his hand to his princess, his beloved, his dirt-stained wife. “Men-men, pleeeease…please come up out of there,” he pleaded to his wife, her head level with his feet as she stood in her pit.
Spraying her white dress with loose dirt, Men-men tossed a billowing shovel load to a pile of earth’s layers behind her.
“Erimentha!” Hume yelled, punctuating each syllable with the staccato of the summer cicada.
Red-faced and smiling, Men-men looked up, smearing mud across her cheek as she pushed hair from her face. …
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Watch for her from across the street, making sure to steal glances from underneath the rim of your baseball cap. You don’t want to stand out, so you wear a Red Sox one, just like your dad used to have. Wait beside the pretzel kiosk and look casual. If you buy a pretzel, it will look more authentic. As you rip open the mustard packet with your teeth and spit the hard plastic corner onto the sidewalk, smirk at all the people rushing home, trying to avoid the rain, failing miserably. Become a backdrop to the human traffic, scurrying across the pavement like roaches.
She finally steps out into the rain, wrapped in a smart wool coat, fumbling with her red umbrella, jerking the handle until it blooms out in front of her.…
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