A frail man with a shock of hair and transparent skin shuffles across a red stone courtyard in the heart of Andalusia. Amidst a cluster of buildings, he knows he must find the Citadel, and is drawn right, right, and then left. A Nasrid archway crowned with an arabesque leads to a long, dimly lit corridor, ending at a wooden door strapped with iron. As he lifts his fist to knock, rusted hinges chirp, and he enters an impossibly tall cylindrical room lined with shelves overflowing with parchments and books. As he slowly scans the rows of writing, a soft swirling sound fills the room, a deep song of distant voices that covers his skin, enters his body, spirals within, and finally fills his heart. At that moment the light switches in a pulse-beat to a hot white.…
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She found a finger swimming in her split pea soup. It was fraternizing with the carrots and onions, acting as if it owned the crock it swam in. She insisted that the finger jump out immediately. When it refused, she bit it, only to realize that it was her own – it throbbed for a while.
She found a foot on a warm sandy beach in St. Thomas, so she invited it to join her in the tranquil sea but the foot wouldn’t move. She watched it from a distance still hoping to find a way to persuade it, but she couldn’t. Much to her dismay, the foot sank deeper and deeper into the sand until it was swallowed up – it didn’t leave any prints. …
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The moon shines through silver-gray clouds. My sister huddles beside my bed.
“It’s all right.” She wipes my tears. “Life offers something unexpected and surprising underneath the rocks.”
I smile, staring at the lights across the hillside. She knew Dad would leave. It’s a pity, the way she gets used to these things. First there was Mom, drifting in and out of our lives. She always said when she got in touch with who she was, she’d send for us. Personal happiness was the most important thing.
Then there was Margaret’s accident. She’d gone to Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies tour, when he played Philadelphia. She got hit by some Vietnam vet after the concert.
She was in the hospital for a month.
I stole Dad’s car to pick her up, even though I didn’t have a license.…
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I was working in a movie theater as an usher. To the uninitiated, who think that the main vocation of an usher is to keep order – probably as a carry-over from going to movies as a kid – their primary duty is cleaning up: the theaters after the movie, restrooms during the movies, the lobby of fallen popcorn and wrappers. With my foot I was holding a theater door open as patrons were exiting after a show, my two hands holding wide the mouth of a plastic trashbag for them to deposit their refuse, if they hadn’t already on the floor. Out of the aether she from the lobby side emerged and asked if she could put a wrapper in
“Sure.”
She did so, and departed. …
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Dear Mother
I am sorry for not coming to visit you,
for not sitting cross-legged in the open field
while reciting confessions to you.
I am sorry you cannot hear my thousand thanks
for the many model trains and superheroes
that drove the family debt to somewhere
between impossible and my father’s insanity.
I should have leapt from my bed and came
to your defense late at night when you
screamed at him, demanding the car keys
because you “just wanted to go for a ride”.
I now confess mother. It wasn’t the heroes
I craved. It was you I so selfishly wanted;
not to be shared with brothers or sisters;
just you and me having French toast at the
diner on Sunday morning, you and me on a
train ride to the city, your voice
singing Nature Boy only to me.…
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He tells me he’s been with Lydia, that woman with red hair. She isn’t a petite beauty, Lydia, she’s almost masculine, and it raises some questions in the college circuit—Gay or what? He tells me he’s been with Lydia while we huddle by the bonfire, the big bonfire outside Stables, the nickname for the lacrosse team house. A party is going on and girls are walking in the snow in high heels.
I am floored. Lydia? Lydia, who could carry a sack of potatoes over one arm, carry ten children on her hips, that farm-girl, milk-fed look—that he could have been with her, my thin little friend.
He’s not so physically small, but his carriage, the way he hunches himself over books, the pouting expression as he touch-types on his Tablet.…
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What am I now that I was not before all of this? I am God. Do you think you are reading this because you chose to? You are an abject fool. I created this chain of events. I willed you here to this time and place and these words. Do not for a moment think these words are just any words for any person. I wrote them so that one day you would read them. And now I pity you. I pity your frailty and your stench. Do not look away! Read these words or suffer my suffering. What suffering? How dare you ask. If I were the man I used to be before all of this I would make you pay for such insolence. I am God.…
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