Mid-afternoon sunlight filtered into the Hayfords’ living room, throwing long, thin shadows across the carpet and softly illuminating objects in the room: the bookshelf, creased spines of mysteries and romances lined up beside photo albums, auto repair manuals; the plaid couch, matching crocheted doilies on each arm; the wood laminate china cabinet, glass doors protecting the shelves of plates, cups and saucers inherited from parents, aunts, a great uncle; and the padded rocking chair where Maureen sat, her body still except for her slowly pushing legs and tense, restless hands – which moved between fluttering about her lap and twisting the gold cross around her neck until the chain went taut – as she watched the light touch the objects around her.
Maureen looked from her and Gerry’s wedding photo on the wall to the cold, quiet street out the window, and then at the half-table that was pushed up against the aging wallpaper facing her, willing the cordless phone sitting on the smooth wooden surface to ring.…
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The manchild moved to where boys go to bald:
a forest of plaster, his language erased.
A terrier brushed his leg,
he longed to pet its fur.
A boy and girl threw sticks at their ball in a tree,
he starved to reach up and embody their hero.
Into his open sore
he deposited an evening.
He emitted more fluids than his liver contained.
He wondered why tattoos gave their harborers cool,
why men sported earrings,
why women sported earrings.
He lay in the grass and drilled out his mind
for images that could untie old knots,
his sweater sleeves tie
around his hefty waist.
He lay in the grass near beautiful girls;
eye contact was neither made nor kept.
Aspirations to jog, walk
the dog around the block.…
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It’s late, and cold with the first hard edge of autumn, and the car is not going to make it all the way back to town on what’s left in the tank.
The gas station is isolated, a lighted concrete patch along a rural highway, fallow fields and scant woods all around it. I rarely stop here. It is too exposed. Tonight I pull in. The sign in the office window says “open”. The office itself is bright with blue fluorescent glare. There is no one in it.
I wait for the attendant to work the pump. This is New Jersey, where I must pretend to helplessness. A single car passes, then another. The station lights hum like summer insects. Another minute slips by on the dashboard clock.…
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To Create Such a Thing
To create such a thing requires a quality eluding precise definition. It requires the right combination, if you like, of insight and insanity. The silent rat-tat-tats of my neighbor’s creativity come to mind. I call them rat-tat-tats to allude to the soundless quality of the noise of creativity.
Now, letters about noise were written, I admit, but that was about noise from the outside. Sirens mainly, okay? There was no proof that I wrote those letters, by the way, but I was arrested all the same and charged.
I maintain my innocence.
This sound, this rat-tat-tat, haunts the hallway of the place at the foot of Ambler Street. He of the rat-tat-tat creating mode is the freak in 204. I am his neighbor across the hall, the freak in 205.…
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I. Seven Words
He’s always been a deep sleeper. She visits his face. Two flies surround the slight entrance of his mouth. She swats at their intrusion, only to find the corner of a piece of paper clamped between his lips. She tugs the paper delicately between thumb and index causing an opening of the mouth. The smell of shredded carcass burns her eyes to a water. A black beetle gnaws at the edge of his tongue. She extracts the rest of the paper from what was once a pink fleshed organ. She unfolds the damp material. Only seven words, Guilt is a hard thing to swallow.
II. A Shower after Dinner
She flushes the goldfish down the toilet. This is how she copes with her anger.…
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When I walked in to Davies Symphony Hall for the first concert of the season, like usual, it was glowing with a gold tint. The low yellow lighting, the hanging sound-reflectors that reflected the beige stage and the few scattered musicians’ instruments already warming up, and the golden pillars spread out along the walls accounted for that. Patrons of both sexes were pouring into the hall in a steady stream, mostly coupled.
I arrived at my seat in the middle of the premier orchestra section and sat down next to a bald elderly man with the curled mustache of a connoisseur. As he turned to greet me, my gaze fastened to his large but rimless monocle covering the specimen of his inquisitive eye, like the lid to a petri dish, which it magnified almost double along with forcing what looked like an almost painful contraction of the eyebrow supporting the monocle, giving him the stately refinement of a man-of-the-world.…
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1. My mother’s vodka. She bought a big jug of it because her parents were coming to visit, and they always had vodka and tonics before dinner. But they stay ed at a hotel and ate at restaurants, and so the big jug just sat there, perched on a wooden rafter in our drafty little cottage, unopened. My mom only drank socially, and then just a glass of wine or something.
The month before my 14th birthday, I took the jug down. My best friend said she was pretty sure that vodka and Coke was a thing, and so we bought a couple cans of Coke and mixed up our drinks in the kitchen, filling the water glasses with half Coke, half vodka. It tasted like paint thinner mixed with earwax.…
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