It was a bookmark during the last week. He hadn’t noticed. Rarely did. She would wait for his Friday night shift. Sleeping neighbors wouldn’t see the taxi. She wondered how it would feel touching down, and if she needed a new book for the journey; something with fresh, unread chapters.
Dog-eared pages scarred novels across his shelf. No care. Fitting. She lived for the quiet hours; long-awaited calm. Silence apart from the soft purring of a cat that wasn’t hers. She craved something of her own; unblemished, familiar. New without being foreign, easy to understand.
Parts of her would remain; fabric dangling from coat hangers, bottled aromas in cupboards, worn letters from happier days tucked into corners of drawers, out of sight. She knew to cradle the essentials of her soul, take them with her. …
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~inspired by George Mason’s “The Harvest Moon,” 1877
Harvest moon glares, jagged from clouds grinding
their glazed edges against her.
Harvest moon bleeds in colors of oak & maple,
her face round as a hazel leaf.
Landscape burns in a blur of garnet & tangerine
peppered with people & dogs
& scythes.
Landscape drowns in bellowing & howling
& the hiss of metal crescents
against grains.
Frayed cats slink over blades & between
the pauses in lusty laughter.
Frayed cats patrol this field of autumn’s
benediction—fleshy broth
of limb & spine & belly.
– t.m. thomson…
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Devon was a difficult patient. Eleven years old when his aunt brought him to me. “He hardly ever speaks,” she said. “But he used to, she told me, before the accident.”
There had been a house fire which killed his brother and his parents; only Devon survived. Devon ran to a neighbor for help. He said he smelled smoke and couldn’t wake his family. The fire department concluded that the fire started in Dylan’s room, possibly from matches.
The aunt was the mother’s sister. It had fallen on her to tell Devon the news and, for now, to raise him. “He says he wants to live in a box,” she said. “That’s why we’re here.”
Our early sessions were unproductive. I was new to the trade.…
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Jim Henderson was trying to concentrate, but couldn’t. He was supposed to be studying for a test on “Julius Caesar” tomorrow, but was brooding about Eileen Robertson’s having dumped him for the senior class president. Caesar had been stabbed in the back by the conspirators and he’d been betrayed by his girlfriend, a greater tragedy.
As Jim sat at the desk in his bedroom, the Folger text of the play, with all the arcane Elizabethan words helpfully explained on the left-hand pages, shimmered before him like a desert mirage. Eileen was gone, no girl would ever love him, he was going to flunk the Caesar test, drop out of school and spend his life stuck in the jerkwater town of Sierra Groves.
He put the book down and called Eileen, but it went straight to her tantalizingly breathy voice mail.…
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I found Henry James in college and he told me who I was.
My dad was just as much a bully as the father in Washington Square, a grim little masterpiece, and even though my Czech father didn’t look anything like Ralph Richardson in the 1949 film version of Washington Square, when it came to contempt, they were twins. I felt as miserable under his scrutiny as Catherine in Washington Square.
But the James book that blew me wide open was The Portrait of a Lady. If you haven’t read it or seen the Nicole Kidman film, it’s a classic Jamesian tale of American innocence seduced and betrayed by European sophistication. Isabel Archer lives quietly in Upper New York State until she inherits a fortune and decides to go to Europe and find some cause or purpose she can devote her money to.…
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I think I was naive envisioning aliens
as somehow native to the aerial realm.
They are like us
probably belted to a crater
with its own share of showers and sorrows.
Aliens also must’ve done the aerodynamic calculations
necessary for metal to become airborne
flying machines produced by a foreign science.
Surely, they understand that asteroids blaze
at a certain rate, a fraction of one alien unit to another.
Otherwise, how could they enter our orbit?
– Lillian Tzanev…
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“A fun and funny girl,” you start, flecks of ash falling from your cheeks — an oddly calming visual in stark contrast to the last couple of horrifying hours. “She just…” A fresh wave of sadness crawls down your face as you try to continue, burying your chin into your chest as you try to hide your embarrassment.
I start to tell you that everything will be okay but stop, fully aware of the devastation unfolding mere feet away, and instead allow the silence to stretch in the narrow space between us. Before it gets too loud, though, I reach over and carefully grab your hand. This prompts you to glance up at me. But only through your eyebrows, and only briefly. “She sounds lovely,” I probe softly, trying to keep you talking, doing what I can to keep you distracted from the fact that I’m addressing a large wound on your head.…
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