“You know, it really is a horrible death,” Jake said.
Molly cradled her bloody thumb in her lap, watching her blue jeans soak up spots the color of wet rust. She thought if she ignored her brother he’d go back inside the house, but he was intent on smoking a cigarette while their parents weren’t around.
“You know what happens?” Jake went on. “You get these horrible headaches, and you can’t sleep. And then your throat closes up—you can’t eat or even swallow.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “And you start going into convulsions. And then you die.” He grinned at her through the haze of smoke surrounding his head.
“You’re full of shit,” Molly said. He was making it up, trying to scare her so she’d tell their parents about the cat bite.…
...continue reading
It’s hard to say exactly how I ended up in this dreadful situation, although I could easily put all the blame on the Thomas-Cook train schedule. If they had made their timetables were a little easier to read, and their columns more evenly aligned, I may have never ended up on a midnight train to Athens. Yet here I was, sandwiched in among all the dissolute of Southern Europe in a third-class train compartment, trying to figure out how I was going to get some sleep.
It was bench seating only, benches that faced one another, with such little space between them that one had to sit straddling the knees of the person opposite you. There were smells of human body odor and of middle-eastern cooking, zeera and black cumin, the mixture of which was not a pleasant thing.…
...continue reading
She starts for the door.
“Wait. How about meeting in the park?”
She turns around, looks at the floor, raises her head slowly, and answers: “I’ll meet you
at two tomorrow in the park under the big maple tree.”
I agree. “We have lots in common.”
Clara has no limp. She lied. We sit across from each other at the picnic table.
The expanse of the park surrounds us. The sward scents the atmosphere with our
words.
“Gene, I don’t know how to say this, the limp is fake,” she says. It’s like wearing a
monocle, a fashion statement. “Do you want to limp?” I fiddled with my cane.
“I have back spasms from dumbbell exercises.” And often want to stab a person’s eyes
out with two prongs of the cane’s four legs.…
...continue reading
My sister named the bear Junior. The blue ribbon wrapped around its neck whipped in the wind as we drove home from school with open car windows on a warm April day. The bear’s cozy white coat absorbed the hot breeze and its soft black eyes beckoned to me calmly. Junior’s eyes said, “Covet me, I should be yours,” although I was in first grade and only the second graders – my sister included – received the gift of the white bear at school that day. Every time I reached across the bench seat for the bear, to pet it, to feel its fluffy coat, my sister pulled the bear closer to herself and reminded me to whom the bear belonged, thus foreshadowing the fights my mother would have to break up in the days to come: My sister claiming the bear which in all actually was rightfully hers while I refused to stop trying to make it mine.…
...continue reading
1. The day of my inauguration was cloudy with a chance of showers.
2. The presidential dog howled at the sky.
3. When the band started playing, the tuba player fled the scene.
4. The band, tuba-less, played on.
5. The skies crackled with thunder and rain sputtered earthward, wetting my
Dormeuil Kirgzy suit.
6. One boy stood up in the crowd and pronounced, “All is lost! All is lost!”
7. I thought this a bit premature.
8. His mother, a big-breasted woman, grabbed his hand and pulled him down to
his seat.
9. An aide whispered in my ear, “Be normal, and the crowd will accept you. Be
deranged, and they will make you their leader.”
10. That’s a real dandy, I thought. I took out a pen from my breast pocket and
wrote it on my hand.…
...continue reading
Downstairs cracked-leather couch: tenth hour of an acid trip that began
an hour before my virginal screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show,
November 1978. In the bed upstairs my college roommate Mike, age 28
and my close friend Cheryl, age 21, consummate their six-hour affair.
In another world, he and his sister babysat for her.
I hear her footsteps now, descending, approaching me. She caresses my
head, looks into my frantic eyes.
“Are you all right?”
She loved me for three years. And in that moment of anti-hallucination, I
realized, finally, that I loved her too.
– Terry Barr
Author’s Note: “Their First Time” [was inspired by] the time when my roommate and my best friend hit it off while I was tripping on the downstairs couch.…
...continue reading
“What do you think my mother was like?” your son asks you as a woman skates by with
her family.
It’s a June day, a sweltering June day where your ice cream doesn’t have any refuge
beneath the surprisingly green leaves at the park. There you are, your adopted son and
you, he and his questions about his biological mother, and you are unsure of an answer.
You can’t tell him what you want to say, the probable and the cold, and you start to sweat
at the beat of the question he keeps pushing, questions you wish didn’t exist. No answer
is ever completely right, and you want to say what you know: she was young and still in
school, got knocked up, and put your son up for adoption, and you know it isn’t pleasant,
so you freak mentally on the inside, the way any parent does when it comes to a first
broken bone, a first epidemic such as the chicken pox, and when he asks why his dinky
gets hard when he looks at girls.…
...continue reading