‘There used to be a house here,’ Mama said, pointing at the small shop that now sells vegetables and fruit.
‘When?’ Arjuna scoffed. ‘When you were a child?’
‘Yes,’ said Mama, glaring at him. ‘Which was only about thirty years ago!’
‘Only!’ Arjuna said, clutching at his forehead and staggering into the path of an oncoming trishaw.
I shoved him out of the way and the trishaw man glared at him, blaring his horn at the same time for dramatic effect.
‘I need to buy some veggies. Come on.’ Mama crossed the road in front of yet another trishaw and went inside the small shop. We followed reluctantly. Coming out of the hot December sun into the darkness of the shop, I felt claustrophobic. The fruits all smelled extremely sweet and I could see flies buzzing around a papaw that looked ever so slightly off.…
I am the bug finder. With the sow-bugs, jooper beetles, nightcrawlers, and dead bumble bees I find, I’ll catch the biggest fish my father has ever seen. We’ll eat it for dinner and everyone’s bellies will be full. I turn over stones and check the wet mud for the worms. The cinder blocks in the garden bed are best, but I wait until Mom is on the phone to turn them over. Then I place them black carefully so she won’t know. I don’t think, when she sees the fish I’ll bring home, that she’ll mind me turning up the wall of her garden bed. I’ve got my pole ready by the door and I’m full of energy because today is a good day for bug finding.…
Driving home from my parent’s house On Father’s Day. Feeling guilty For almost hugging him—for Touching his arm instead. We sit Outside while my brother cooks Hamburgers and my nephew Enjoys his new BB gun. An Extended family of flies Lands, two at a time, on every Surface—even the barrel. We Wave them away until our arms Get tired. Mom sits across from Me and she points over my Shoulder at the solitary Crow perched in a cypress tree. He’ll be here long after we’re gone, She says, and I notice she keeps Her inhaler close at hand now. It’s my security blanket, She says. I worry about her More now. And I don’t know what to Say when my brother finally Embraces her.
Jeff Goldblum was maddening. Mitzy lay in bed, naked to the ceiling fan’s rotations, sweat beading on her cleavage, her stomach, everything. Jeff would not take his eyes off her, that stare so moody, so dark, just like Jurassic Park.
“What are you going to do to me, Goldblum.” She parted her dry lips.
The dark philosopher would not reply, just hummed under his breath. Why anybody paid to watch him front the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, she couldn’t imagine. No musical talent. Just an atonal whine. No, his talents lay elsewhere and were of the pectoral variety.
How she had ended up here, trapped in her bed, held hostage by this handsome fiend she didn’t know, except she never should’ve had drinks with that man last week, the one whose Tinder profile said he was an electrician.…
My father never spends money without purpose. If a selfless father purchases extra pastries for his daughter’s enjoyment, buys instruments to gift his daughter the wonders of music, encourages his daughter to earn decent grades so she can achieve her dream job, or pays his daughter’s tuition for the fun of attending a prestigious school, then my father is not a selfless father. Rather, my father lives with a selfish investment in the cultural expectation of filial piety.
Before high school, I attended Carmel Valley Middle School—a campus littered with scabs of gum stuck to the cement grounds; where kids throw pencils at the ceiling, cheering whenever one punctures the styrofoam, or where kids, tucked in black beanies, oversized sweatshirts, and ripped jeans, swap bags of meth behind the history buildings.…
Roy Lichtenstein. Credit: Bill Ray. Printed with permission – billraypix/Marlys Ray, 6/2022
The picture above is a photograph (captured by photographer Bill Ray) of the artist Roy Lichtenstein sitting amongst four of his paintings at a New York art gallery. It is hanging in my second-floor hallway, just to the right of the upstairs port of my chair lift. I face it when I depart the lift, and since I stand up slowly, I have time to appreciate its complexity.
Please focus on the picture in the upper right corner where the anonymous woman says: IT’S -IT’S NOT AN ENGAGEMENT RING. IS IT?
They are a handsome couple in a conventional sense. Dressed well and expensively, especially in view of the double-stranded pearl necklace Betsy is wearing.…
I very much dislike being at a buffet – Mary Ruefle
I stand in the stairwell say to him that he and I aren’t going to work out, him being a cowboy, aspiring cop. He marries a librarian. I go on to psychedelics, sit-ins, join a cult,
marry and move to a place he would’ve hated. My mother tells me, twenty years in, she’s heard he still has my picture on his mantle. You never lose the first he-was-everything-to-me.
I’ve googled him over the years, imagined how a call might go, nearly did one summer.
