February 2011
28 posts
January 31, 2011
They sat in silence, attempting to ignore the sounds that told all too clearly what was going on in the other room. Slowly the air between them thawed, seeming to warm even as the untouched food between them grew cold. She understood that nothing would ever be as good as it had just been, before the door had blown open and this young man had stumbled into her life, but that maybe they could...
January 2011
32 posts
January 30, 2011
I’ve been focusing more on doing things in my mind - you might call it imagining I’ve done things - than on physically doing them. It’s much less of a drain on resources to run through a scenario in my mind and shunt it right to memory rather than go through the effort of actually doing the thing. Sure, there are some acts - eating, for example - that are harder to fake, and for...
January 29, 2011
They make their home in the trees, you know. You don’t notice them at first, you could go years without noticing them, but once you know what to look for you see signs of them everywhere. Last Thursday I was on my way home from school, whistling tunelessly through my teeth, when I remembered I had left a book there. I stopped and turned around mid-stride, and I saw one right there in front...
January 28, 2011
Were you there? Were you? I don’t think you were there, I would have remembered. But you really should have been there. What I saw there cannot be described in mere words; it requires gestures, variations in tone of voice, enlarging of the eyes at key junctures. So I think you should come over some time and I’ll tell you all about it in a way that really gets it across, puts you right...
January 27, 2011
I wish that I could describe in even the simplest way the sequence of events, faster than the twitch of a cat’s tail, occurring in less time than it took for you to read that last word (this one; no, this one), the sequence that was triggered by my thumb pressing on a small area on the bottom half of this smooth, light-emitting surface and that ended with the appearance, on the upper half of...
January 26, 2011
Ben was new here, but then he was always new everywhere. He couldn’t stay, couldn’t get to know anyone, certainly couldn’t get a job. He looked at people he didn’t know - which is today everyone - and he saw faceless units, sort of like him but not him and therefore not anyone. He wandered from place to place in hopes of finding something that might make him want to stay,...
January 25, 2011
I’m down to the last string on this guitar. I haven’t talked to another human in months, I haven’t slept on a real mattress in I don’t know how long. I’ve tried to be so careful, playing so softly, my ear to the fretboard so only I can hear, but one by one the strings wear and pop, and now I’ve just got the one. When the D string went it slashed me across the cheek, made it look like I’d...
January 24, 2011
At first when I lost my arm I thought it might be OK. I had a show scheduled in a couple weeks, and I thought I’d get a friend to play my guitar parts and I could focus on my singing, which could always use a little extra attention anyway. That show ended up being one of my best, and for a while I felt pretty good about how things were going. Then I realized that I had no way of writing new...
January 23, 2011
Overnight, as we slept, the entire police force was at work. In the morning we went about our business, unaware that anything was afoot - some slowing here, a detour there. But then we were stopped dead, and we looked around and saw we’d been corralled, herded together and fenced off. We waited for hours, the cops ignoring our pleas until, without explanation, they lifted the barricades and...
January 22, 2011
It’s never a bad time to lie naked on the slime-covered rocks and let the sea slugs play over you, feel the waves lap across your body and the salt water evaporate on your chest, crystals forming as the sun has its way with the water. It’s never a bad time to clutch yourself, shivering, looking around awkwardly in hopes that someone will step out of the crowd to hold you, warm you....
January 21, 2011
These Jello shots aren’t just going to drink themselves. We’ve been here a long time, and we’ve seen many things. It’s time we took a moment, let these gelatinous lozenges of booze slide down our throats, and thought about our lives and the world and who we are. I ask you: do you think these Jello shots are going to drink themselves? Because let me tell you, my friend, they...
January 20, 2011
I’ve never owned a car. I guess my horse has always been enough for me. He is an exceptional horse, though: he can run faster than many cars (I have, in fact, been pulled over for riding over the speed limit, which I’m not sure is even legal - I’m still waiting for an answer from the Governor to the question of whether the limit is for any moving thing, or just for motor...
January 19, 2011
I like our house. It’s a good size, has walls in all the right places, a roof up top to stop the rain and birds and such from getting in, windows that you can look out and see all the stuff going on outside. It’s a really nice place is what I’m saying.
My old house had all kinds of problems: wires running everywhere, grass in all the wrong places, walls made of stuff that...
January 18, 2011
“This has to stop.” She put down her mug of coffee, which had been trembling an inch below her lip, on the verge of being sipped from, for almost a minute as her eyes bored into mine. “We have to stop this.”
“Drinking coffee?” I knew she didn’t mean drinking coffee.
“You know I don’t mean drinking coffee.” She was right, but at the...
January 17, 2011
And then after all that progress, you just start over. We had a good feeling about this. We saw what you were doing and we appreciated it; we had a good feeling about it. But now I don’t know. What are we even looking at? I wish you’d consulted with us, given some hint. We had no idea there was anything wrong. Now it’s all ruined, all your work is gone. Perhaps it’s...
January 16, 2011
It seems the rain might never stop. We don’t necessarily mind it too much - at night the sound is soothing, lulling us to a deep sleep filled with dreams of horses running down the beach, singing to us sweet songs of victory, and we never have to worry about running out of water - but even an hour of sun to dry out our shoes and warm our faces would be a refreshing change. Instead, we will...
January 15, 2011
There’s only so much I can do at one time. You might not think there’s anything going on at all, but you know what’s going on just beneath the surface; you know and I know. I have so much responsibility, if I were to flick my eye to the left for a moment, civilizations would fall; stars would wobble in their orbits; presidents would eat unhealthy breakfasts and die before their...
January 14, 2011
I hit the ball. You hit the ball. You don’t seem to be tiring of this game, this endless volley. I hit the ball. I wonder what you’re thinking as you watch the ball come inevitably toward you. You hit the ball. It occurs to me that you’re just as clueless as I am, caught in this loop with nothing to do but respond to the stimulus at hand. I hit the ball, but with a new...
January 13, 2011
They were The People of the Mountain. Sure, they’d moved into our neighborhood years before, and we knew them to say hi to, wave while you’re lugging out the garbage, that kind of thing, but we never knew their names, just that they’d come from The Mountain. We never knew which mountain - there are several within driving distance, or even trekking distance - but they used the article so...
January 12, 2011
We’ve done this all before, you realize. Human history, I mean. Yes, I know you probably think that Man is the culmination of millions of years of evolution on Earth, whose existence and capacity to sustain life are the product of billions of years of cosmic events, or whatever. I know that’s what they’re teaching you, but there’s much more to it. We humans have run...
January 11, 2011
I had this neighbor a while back; I don’t remember her name, but she was pretty different. You know how some ladies will have tons of cats, and their house gets all full of them, until it’s dirty and stinky and diseased? She was kind of like that, only instead of cats she had stuffed penguins. Dozens of ‘em. Or a dozen, anyway. They didn’t stink or spread disease or...
January 10, 2011
I try not to complain. I do my best, in whatever situation I find myself in, no matter how uncomfortable, or unpleasant, or downright painful, to complain as little as possible. I pride myself on responding to adversity with a grin and a “can-do” attitude.
There are circumstances, however, that leave me displeased, and in which I have no choice but to make this displeasure known. ...
January 9, 2011
Albert had a way of standing in front of a wall such that unless you were looking directly at him, and knew that he was there, you couldn’t see him. Nobody, least of all Albert, knew how he did it - hardly anyone knew that he did it - but it was a skill that he’d had for as long as he could remember, and that he employed so often he was beginning to wonder whether he existed at all. Sometimes...
January 8, 2011
As I stood in the thrift store, two things happened at once: Your band’s flaccid cover of that widely adored song from the 80s started playing, and I looked up from the pants I was considering trying on into your earnest blue eyes. I had just been working up an epic eyeroll/groan in reaction to the music, so meeting your eyes resulted in a spasm somewhere between a hacking cough, a hiccup,...
January 7, 2011
I came home and you weren’t here. As I walked up the steps, keys in hand, as I turned the key in the lock, I held a picture in my mind - not just a picture but a smell, a temperature, a slight hum - of the house with you inside it, awaiting, consciously or not, my return. Then I opened the door and you were not here. The house was cold, silent, empty. But I knew you’d be along...
January 6, 2011
You rarely know when the last time you see someone will be, and you rarely treat this time as the last. Keeping that in mind, we can look at this as a blessing. But it might be better not to think about it at all; instead, let us be present with each other, find discussion topics that will enable us to converse in an animated, amiable fashion and leave with a lovely, if slightly unrealistic,...
January 5, 2011
Sometimes, when I’m all alone, I like to breathe. I’ll look around to make sure nobody’s around and then, slow and casual, I’ll start pulling air into my lungs. I usually use my nose, just because it seems more discreet - a slight flaring of the nostrils, rather than your big dumb mouth gaping open - but if I’m in my room with the door closed and Chris is out for...
January 4, 2011
There’s a girl, and there’s a guy, The Wrong Guy. She’s independently wealthy, he works and is brusque, rough around the edges. Being that he is The Wrong Guy, they hate each other.
The girl meets The Right Guy - handsome, intelligent, safely funny - and they hit it off immediately. Soon marriage seems inevitable, but somehow the girl cannot get The Wrong Guy and his...
January 3, 2011
I’ve kept this dollar for so long, I barely remember when I got it, or what the circumstances of its acquisition could have been to require me to hold on to it for so long, to treat it with such reverence. Sometimes I think maybe it wasn’t me who received it first at all, who assigned such mysterious value to this humble bit of currency. Perhaps a grandparent or great-uncle? A...
January 2, 2011
We’ve run out of things to say, but we need not fear the silence, the verbal desert stretching out ahead of us forever. We each have our story that we decided to tell when we ran out of things to say - yours about the dog and the kitten and the car and the bridge, mine about the meal and the aunt and the underdone roast and the empty house - and we promised never to tire of telling and...
January 1, 2011
All I did was sneeze. It didn’t seem like that big of a sneeze; from the next room you might not have even noticed it. But as soon as I began to reinhale the breath that I had just expelled so forcefully, I knew something was wrong. The sneeze had flexed every muscle in my body in such a way that not one of them would ever move again without severe pain. My days of performing such tasks as...
December 31, 2010
In the end, we find ourselves much where were, knowing more or less what we knew before we began. Some of us have gained or lost jobs, or gotten promotions; some have married, or divorced, or lost limbs; there are those who have been born again, or completed correspondence courses in major appliance repair; each of us has traveled to a distant land and participated in the healing rituals of its...
December 30, 2010
I am inside the Library. I don’t know if there’s anyone out there, or if anyone is reading my words, but I had to try something. There are 37 of us here, mostly adults. There are five children, and they’re holding up pretty well; in some ways I guess they’re doing better than we are. They have a decent number of books to read, but without power the CDs and DVDs and...