We convene to read from a book that can’t even settle upon its own name. We arrive as realists to a place and time where reality eludes us. I summon you to try and make sense of the nonsensical, to impose structure on that which flows like water through our hands, to explain the unexplainable.
Bruno Schulz, an art teacher and painter in Drogobych, Poland, scribed three literary works of art and then was shot dead by a Gestapo officer – because he was another officer’s tame Jewish painter. Even his death is rendered ambiguous, since he had a revolutionary nest of Poles that wanted to smuggle him to freedom. He chose what he had known all his life: a claustrophobic death in a provincial town that had claimed him and brutalized him in its cloistered grasp.…
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I drove to the Skyway when I lost my job and I got pulled over for speeding on my way there. When the officer gave me the ticket and told me to drive more carefully, I nodded and called him sir with no sarcasm whatsoever. When he drove past me to continue south on I-275, I crumpled the ticket and tossed it into the back seat.
I pulled off at the pier. I got out and I opened the trunk and got out my rod, bucket and tackle box. I took off my tie and tossed it in the trunk before I slammed it shut. I felt the sun warming my face as I walked slowly toward the bait shop. I would shut my eyes when I walked and tilt my head up at the sky to feel how lovely the sun felt instead of fluorescent light.…
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I am contemplating suicide, or rather the different ways I could commit it, when I hear a knock at the door. I open it and a man stands in front of me. He is tall and a bit scrawny, his arms hang long, down almost to his knees. His blonde hair rests just above his shoulders and looks as if it hasn’t been washed in several days. His eyes are a deep brown, almost black, but they are big and inviting—not friendly, really, but maybe passionate.
He says he is here to save me. I tell him that I wasn’t actually going to do it. I was just thinking about it. But I am a bit confused as to how he could know what I had been thinking.…
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This morning I passed the aftermath of an automobile accident. It was in the quiet that follows the crash, after the squeal of breaks, the shaky moving of damaged vehicles to the side of the road. A car in the line behind tapped the horn and like molasses, we all slid past the scene. A petite woman stood next to the crushed fender of her new minivan. I could hear her sobbing into her cell phone, the rise and fall of it, not the words themselves. In a second car a young man sat slumped behind the wheel. His car was old and formerly luxurious, from a time when everyone had overflowing ashtrays. Before shoulder straps and airbags.
That’s the way the morning started, and, as always when something happens involving the young, my thoughts went to the mother, even to what she must have thought about that gas guzzling car. …
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Joe’s Shopping list January
- Size the ring
- Buy flowers
Joseph and Sydney’s Shopping List February
- Look at wedding bands
- Start a registry
- Price bridesmaid and groomsman outfits
- Book a reception building
- Find a caterer
Joseph and Sydney Shopping list March
- Gas up the car
- Pay final payment for caterer
- Pay the priest
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She didn’t know she was having an affair until she broke up with her. There were moments when she would have left her husband. Quiet moments, almost silent moments, when she would have ended her marriage. For what? For nothing. For something that existed only at the margins, in the imagination.
What will she remember about her? A seemingly honest laugh that wanted to fill the room, but was always stifled. An endless curiosity. A soul-wrenching once-in-a-life-time curiosity that felt ceaselessly flattering. A charm tinged with vulnerability that she knew was irresistible. A razor-sharp intelligence, so often on display. An uncommon understanding, whether real or imagined, that was at once thrilling and piercing.
How did it end? With nothing. With yet another agonizing retreat. With yet another silence.…
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Adham comes to our room most nights. Sometimes when I arrive he’s already settled in the space next to his mother. Sometimes he comes in only after I walk through the door. His body ends at my hips and when I lie next to him his hands find their way into the heavy folds of my neck. He no longer smells like baby, but like dust, like the thin ring of mildew below our sink, like our clothes when Farzana hangs them on the line too soon after it’s rained. He’s already decaying, just four years after he is born. I wonder why it has to start so early.
He’s not in our bed tonight. I leave the door open to the bathroom as I wash my hands, the lavender exorcising the feel of the airplane, the memory of Aerolife from my hands. …
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