Kelly Erickson Compilation

#151

NOBODY OWES YOU

Girl, don’t wish for a lottery win;
Don’t wish for a miracle to make you thin;
Don’t wish for a man to be your saviour,
Just get out and make it on your own behaviour.

Sometimes you feel like a little lost soul,
Like God didn’t give you enough to be whole.
But God doesn’t owe you, you stand on your own;
Whatever you face, you push through it alone.

Girl, don’t wish to be seen as angelic,
Martyrdom’s out and you’ll look like a relic.
Enemies come and they demonize you
Don’t wish them the worst, it just comes back to bite you.

It hurts to work hard and receive no reward
To keep going back when you mean to go forward
You just want to wish and have wishes come true
Why can’t a boatload of luck hail on you?

Girl, don’t wish for the easy way out
Those who don’t sweat will always have doubt
The pedestal you stand on, you’ve got to score
The liquor tastes sweeter when you do the pour

Exalted or not, there are smaller successes
Making the rent, cleaning your messes
Not waiting around for a ship to come in
That doesn’t have your name on it, and doesn’t house your djinn

Girl, don’t wish for a lottery win;
Be unrepentant, make miracle happen;
Don’t wish for a man to be your saviour,
Just get out and make it on your own behaviour.

#150

DEEP… DEEP IN HER FRENZIED STATE

The game was on, no doubt about it, and the histrionics had begun.

A low wail was came up in his throat when the dominatrix began her torturous routine, and it soon billowed into a matinee performance of his twitching and groaning, her vicious amusement. He thought he could barely control himself, but the truth was he couldn’t at all. This was no laparoscopic; this was full-out murder… if only the target of her cruelty weren’t dead already.

Oh, she was skilled at the setup; she let him watch her eviscerate the first victim, then a second and third, knowing that he was both repulsed and fascinated by her cold knifework. His mouth was watering, yet oddly dry. He cleared his throat repeatedly in between sounds of flesh severed from its mortal confines. He tried to look away— he did! —but she imbued every stroke with more drama than the situation required, looking up every few seconds to lock eyes with him, and he had to watch.

She knew it. He was certain that she wore the smallest, chiffonlike whisper of a grin.

“Take your pick?” she asked, waving a knife at a pair steroidally-engorged breasts, knowing his guts would roil at the very thought. And there it was—a wink. She was mocking his weak constitution, his contradictory desires and beliefs. Damn, but she was cruel. He seemed to have aged a hundred years in the last fifteen minutes. He felt his face shrivel into that of a wizened old codger, and he longed for the codger’s ability to howl out loud about things that might offend him.

Things that should offend anyone, really.

She gave off a verisimilitude of being sympathetic to him when there was no knife nearby, but there were times when her inner urges were so strong she simply could not resist. then she transformed into this… this madwoman… and he became the (not-terribly) silent victim in the room.

The only one who could scream, yet he was the helpless lover who wouldn’t dare. Because yes, he did love her; that epiphany had come to him long ago, and he held fast to it, even when she was deep in her frenzied state.

Even when her parents and their friends were coming over, and his normally calm, contented vegan wife, was wildly mutilating chicken for eight.

#149

THE PORNOGRAPHY OF WISHING FOR 3 SQUARES AND LISTENING FOR APPLAUSE
Once upon a time there was a pirate in a tree
He couldn’t see beyond his nose but he always saw me
He tried to fly up to the sun, when it didn’t work he walked
In lessons most pedantic, he taught me not to balk
and to listen for applause
in every pause

Can you write away your problems? Can you paint away your tears? Can you jump into seventh bar, and sing out all your fears?
What is Art for, anyway, if those “pure” Artists sink,
and those on high are fakers who’ve traded Art for drink?
Can I write my love a sonnet? Can I sculpt his inner truth? Can I swirl and soar and shout his name—is warbling lust uncouth?

Once I loved a crocodile, he loved me, too, most sore
His pipes were not a problem like the fangs I knew he wore
I held him off behind a chair, but sometimes I craved touch
His arms were soft as whispers, though his claws were a bit much
I needed the applause
from those big paws

Sometimes you have to write like this, if only for a while
It helps to get self-pity out, although the poem’s vile
Don’t take yourself too seriously, don’t frame your own sweet smile
Your genius is in disappearing, as ego-free words beguile

A writer, an artist, a singer’s no saint; try though they might they crave love
We all wish our Art would make viewers faint, then spend lifetimes rising above
the pornography of wishing for 3 squares,
and listening for applause

My child, you know I want the best for you, I work so hard
Manipulating words and facts and visuals on cards
Hotels and fancy meals you crave, while I can only see
Beyond my nose, so many roses, dancing on our tree
Remember, there’s applause
in every pause.

#148

MADAME’S GRIM PERFECTION

At first, I let it slide.

It was only a pinprick in the side of the piano. Nothing to lose sleep over, really. Could just be the natural settling of the wood or somesuch.

Then, almost overnight, it was nine. I would sit feet away from my daughter and her instructor, listening to crooked scales and endless critiques, staring at the holes in the wood and wondering if I dared to mention to the imperious woman who had taken on my hapless child as a favor to my uncle—Madame, there’s something eating your Steinway!

As yet, no. She was the archetype of formidable piano-teacher-diva, and I couldn’t get up the guts.

The following week you could thread a ribbon through the holes, as they began to merge for no reason I could discern; a week later, you could stuff a cocktail napkin in the now-gaping, single hole. Surely the sound was off? And there was a scent. I could resist no more.

“Madame Frou-frou,” I began at a pause between movements of some Schubert piece, while wishing for a swig of merlot to soothe my nerves, “there’s a hole…”

“Don’t bother me, child,” she sniffed, and I felt as foolish as my daughter when she (still) couldn’t find middle C.

Then it’ll stay. I wonder how many other children’s mothers are staring at her waning wood in cowed silence? Well, darn it, I’m nobody’s child, and my silence will be defiant from now on.

At last, when you could throw a baseball through and help your kid to hammer the middle C from a safe distance, the villain showed his face.

And his whiskers.

And his ever-twitching nose.

Why a rat had decided to make Madame Frou-frou’s baby grand his home, I’ll never know, but that summer I got a terrible satisfaction from watching him peek his head out and around on every sour note.

Was he a music lover or a music hater? I couldn’t tell. All that summer, he was my Pierrot, looking just a bit sad, but providing me with comic relief when he would pop his head out in silence and take his tiny bows from his growing stage.

Inside, I admit it with a twinge; I was almost applauding.

He’d chewed a six-inch hole in Madame’s grim perfection.

#147

AIR APART

“I can’t breathe,” he said.

I knew what he really meant, though. Sometimes the closeness made me feel like I wanted to scream, but I had no air to manage it. I was the one who was raised not to make a fuss—one’s always got to be the peacemaker, right? –so he’d never heard it from me.

Everything about our life together was cozy, smiling, and neatly arranged. Our friends envied us, having it so “together” just a few years after college. Everybody wanted to hang out with us. Everybody wanted to be us. I envied us, too… the “us” that they saw. The “us” that we were, was something mechanical. Sterile. Like my desire not to have children.

I tended to overthink, in those days, or so he told me. I wanted things to be perfect before we invited a new human being into our precious world.

But something was stinking—nowhere near perfect—just under the precious surface, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. He had always said that he thought I enlarged problems that weren’t there until I had something big enough to work on. I had always tried to come closer to his ideal mix of intelligently examining things, then relaxing about them, but relaxing seemed to drain me.

Now I know it was because of that sub-surface stinking. It took me years to accept that I’d been right all along, after years of trying to convince myself to see things his way—a baby wouldn’t have fixed the fact that he loved our life, but he didn’t love me.

In the end, he used my unwillingness to “move forward” to tell me that he couldn’t breathe in our relationship.

I grabbed at the break, maybe with a little too much joy. He seemed stunned by my readiness to split with him.

I told him he was absolutely right. That I was sorry about the suffocation. That I felt it too, every day, but that I didn’t like to make waves.

“You’re suffocating?” he asked, his voice an unsteady creak. He had obviously built this up to be the moment when he dumped me and made me cry, and instead it was the moment when he set me free from our lies.

When I left, I guess he was still crying, but I never looked back.

#146

A PROPOS OF NOTHING…

You say you want a revolution? Change your self first, bucko. I get tired of hearing how everybody else is doing it wrong from smug punks (“upsetting your future” as if the future of the ragged masses doesn’t count) who’ve never had to claw and fight for anything in their lives. You’ve got enough to eat 4 squares a day, you’ve got your fancy degree handed to you on a platter, you’ve got money to create a bubble of leisurely navel-gazing around you and your equally arrogant friends. Not one real tragedy, not one belief-shattering danger, has ever dared to touch your gently-moisturized skin. You’re set up in your tower assessing the masses for their failings, making a lot of noise about their third-world bargains and their wasteful autos, their mixed-up kids and their McHorrid diets, without ever stopping to ask yourself whose priorities are the crazy ones—theirs or yours?

Their choices seem random to you, unjustifiable and short-termist, but it’s day-to-day survival in the real world, baby. The world you and your organic-juice, single-malt-whisky, solar-condo, hybrid-SUV-friends live if complete ignorance of.

You wouldn’t take a tip if I offered one. It’s far beneath you to examine anything but other people’s failings. But hey, you’re always spouting your drivel unsolicited, so I’ll give it a shot—address today’s tragedies today. Lift the people around you who can’t lift themselves—you know, the ones you think won’t lift themselves?

Give everybody a tiny breath of that secure, soft, navel-gazing time that you take for granted. Then maybe the ragged McMasses will give you a hand with your Save the Future Revolution.

Truth is, you can’t do it alone. You need the McPeople.

#145

THE (SHADOW) BOXER

The last of the blow was gone, and Sandy was insanely itchy to move. With lunch almost over, he couldn’t convince the others to get up from the lounge, so he was left to mutter about their lazy asses while they waved him off, and head out to the parking ramp for a smoke and a shake, alone.

He leaned on his car for a minute and took a drag, giving a less-than-enthusiastic version of his usual wink to the No Smoking sign on the column beside his reserved parking spot. The smoke clung to him, barely rising in the close air of the ramp, reaching up and scratching at his eyes. Fuck. Everything seemed lazy today. He set the cig down at the edge of his hood, tossed his head to crack his neck a couple of times, and began to shadow-box. Fighting boredom. Fighting irritation. Fighting the sense that he was missing something… that all of them, his pompous friends with their pompous sportscars, and Sandy himself, with his ridiculous red racer, were flying from place to place only to pay for all the flying cars and the flying coke. Not because there was a damned thing about their lives that they liked… and not a damned thing they wanted to get to faster.

They refused to get up and move. He refused to sit down and accept. Who was the bigger ass?

When he’d worked up a sweat (or when he’d killed the sweat of that last line), he thrust his head in every direction once more to loosen up, and tried to motivate himself for the afternoon. I’m ready. I’ll get in there and show people a thing or two. I do love my job. I do love my job.

As he walked back in to the building, flashing his badge absentmindedly to the temp at the staff entrance, he searched his blackberry for the afternoon schedule.

Shit! I forgot about the bypass at 1:30. They’re probably wondering where I am.

Before he had to hear his named paged all over the P.A., Dr. Sanderson started flying down the corridor, to get himself to prep.

#144

PAPA’S PASSIONATE WOMEN

My sister entered womanhood the same year my mother left it behind, or so my dad liked to say.

The wild fluctuations of mood in the house were enough to send us both out for air on a frequent basis. I was only seven and nobody was telling me what was going on, exactly, but the looks my sister could send would cut anyone to the bone, and the way she talked! Whoo-ee! I’d have been in trouble if I dared to sass like that. I didn’t even understand what she was saying sometimes, but I knew she was testing Mama something fierce. And Mama… she seemed to spend a lot of time feeling poorly. She was sad a lot. If I did have to spend time in the house, I’d bring her tea or sit and stroke her hand.

(I could be a little crazy myself, at times—being little when everybody else around is big makes you need to run and shout—and holding my small palm in hers, running her gentle fingers over the back of my hand, was Mama’s way of bringing me back down to Earth. Guess she liked that I did it back to her sometimes.)

Well, you know, I always followed Papa around a lot (Germaine, my sister, was Mama’s constant companion in spite of that year of fighting and crying, so I just naturally became Papa’s shadow). Sometimes I encouraged Papa to follow me, though, and he always looked grateful for it.

“Ellie,” Papa would say, when he discovered that I’d gotten our fishing gear together and popped into his study with everything but the waders on, after a Saturday morning already scarred by more fighting-‘bout-nothing than we could take, “Ellie, the early fish’ll be all gone. But maybe we’ll find some like us who just got to get out of the house, eh?”

He’d holler to Mama not to worry, that we’d make ourselves a couple of mosquito sandwiches for lunch and get out of their hair for a while, throw the bag, the poles, and the waders into the back of the truck, and pull the seat belt ‘cross my middle before beating it out of our driveway with a grin that could light up all of Nova Scotia.

Get out of their hair for a while. “Papa, do they fight because we’re bothering them?”

“My curly little Eloise-bird.”

It might be ten minutes’ more of driving before he came up with the right words. As long as I was his curly-bird, I didn’t mind that at all, though I might nearly forget my question in the silence. I would play with the radio, which could never get any music that didn’t sound like a nap to me, as we drove along the coast road. We were nearly to the bay when he looked over and ruffled my hair. I could smell the open waters and practically taste the fish we’d bring home tonight… and hear the tales we’d tell if we couldn’t find any who’d bite.

“I adore all my women, Ellie. Mama first, of course! And Germaine and you—all God’s gifts to a quiet man who loves his books and his fishing-boat.

“It might seem random to you now, the way Mama and Germaine get so emotional, but it’s part of nature’s way. They love life so much, you see, and at times those two women love it more than you and I can imagine. It’s their passions that make them so beautiful—and so hard for us to understand. But no, Ellie, they don’t fight because we’re bothering them, and if you promise not to tell Mama, I’ll let you in on a little secret. We’re not ‘getting out of their hair.’ We’re just two simple people, Papa and curly-bird, going fishing.

“But one day, my beautiful girl, you’ll be just as passionate as they are. Maybe a day of fishing will seem very quaint and silly to you then. Maybe then, you’ll say things I can’t understand to your old papa.”

I must have looked puzzled. I know I felt betrayed. Papa should know me better than that! He’d never spot me being as crazy as they were. I quietly vowed that I would always stay just like I was in that moment… and maybe the memory of that promise helped me navigate the waters that Gerry and Mama looked like they were stuck in, too deep for their waders.

Maybe it was just wanting to hold on to these moments with my dad.

Papa broke up my knitted brows with one of his big bear-laughs. “Bit of a shock to you, eh? Well little bird, for now, let’s just park the truck, thank God for the big blue sky, and wish for rainbow trout.”

#143

UNCLE WILFRED

Uncle Wilfred was always the funny uncle.

He came down from the Acadian backwoods for a better life in New England. That much is true.

It was said he was a lumberjack. Or a bootlegger. Or outrunning his past. That part was never clear, as Uncle Wilfred was an old French storyteller who loved to build an element of mystery for his nieces and nephews to marvel at.

Unlike my Irish relatives, Wilfred had a way of telling a story in as few words as possible that I found fascinating. Was it to keep from showing his thick accent, as my mother thought? Was it because only the Irish feel the need to tell as story as slowly as possible, to excavate every detail so you feel the story along with us, and we weren’t used to another way? Was it to stop time, and let us linger with him in the story? Or was it because, as one of the happily-henpecked husbands in a family of seven loquacious daughters (my aunts), he’d learned to share the heart of the tale fast or forever hold his peace?

Who knows? We loved him for it. We’d sit around Uncle Wilfred’s lounge chair—it was Grandpa’s really, but for some reason Grandpa always gave it up when Wilfred was around—watch him scratch his head, thick with wiry grey curls that looked almost blue, and smoke fancy Cuban cigars he claimed a brother smuggled to him, down through Canada—and we’d wait, knees pulled in to our chests, for the inspiration to come to him, when the words would tumble from his lips.

He’d stop scratching those old curls and sit forward in the lounger, and stare longingly into the Canadian woods for a moment. Just the act of sitting forward helped us set up the story in our own minds. We could see the snow, bending the sapins verts, hear the crunch of his boots as he trudged home, bones aching, from work, and imagine him wishing for a day when he could afford smuggled Cuban cigars. Grandpa’s black-and-white television droned in the background, but we cousins heard nothing but Wilfred’s breathing, surely looking like frosty white puffs as he made that last hill through the woods, to the clearing where his Papa and Mama had built their cabin so long ago.

Uncle Wilfred wasn’t the funny uncle for telling silly stories. If you wanted a guffaw you’d listen at dinner to Uncle Sam making up myths about the pterodactyls he met back when he was a caveman, or to Grandpa comparing a pineapple, prickly yet sweet, to our grandmother: “She really shines when you cut into her, kids—never settle for a lady who’s too obvious,” he’d say with a droll wink, accompanied by laughter and a roll of Grandma’s (very patient) brown eyes.

No, Uncle Wilfred was funny in an odd sort of way. In as few words as he could, he’d set you down in the forest with him, tell you a lesson about life when he was a kid that would stick with you more than all the lectures your parents could ever give, and leave you with something the Irish never did—a crushingly bittersweet sense that time is already flying away from you, while you sit, rapt, at the foot of a lounger, watching Uncle Wilfred spin yarns in a very few words… making you long to walk back into the woods of his youth and stop time, pull your knees in to your chest, and sit at the foot of a snowcovered sapin vert as young Wilfred Rosaire trudges by.

#142

UPBEAT WAS THE WATCHWORD FOR THE DAY

A drum announced the re-opening of the plant. Upbeat was the watchword for the day. Workers streamed on to the lot. The issues that held the two sides apart for so long—workers wanted to receive more secure pension options, wanted their benefits computerized so the process was more transparent, wanted more flex time… management felt they should adhere to the terms they’d agreed to, claimed the workers were digging a hole in the company’s future, and of course any  “demands” always rub management the wrong way when they’re certain that they are benevolent rulers in their little kingdom—those issues faded away like remnants of an odd dream you’d rather forget, when the gates were opened and the doors unlocked once again.

The strike made investors flee for safer havens, and the company nearly went under during the six-months’ stalemate. In this odd dream, nobody was cheering, if they went back to work, and not too many would be going back. 2/3 of the workers lost their jobs.

Management said: “We’ve made important strides.”

rum-tum

Organizers said: “We’ve shown this company that we will not be ignored.”

rat-a-tat

Workers said: “You take what you can get and say Thank You, y’know?”
roll. roll. roll

#141

SWING TIME, BOURBON STREET DARK

The beat: a swingy mix of tom-toms and hi-hat. Throw in a double bass and a trumpet, pleading in the distance, and you’ve got the feel for the sound I heard that night.

The energy: smoky electricity. The kind that sets your guts on fire; the kind that rots your soul if you let it. You know what I’m talking about. The kind that makes you do stupid things.

The night: late, late. September’s in the air and I’m conscious of having missed something. These last sweaty, starlit nights of August oppress me with their fleeting potential and permanent futility. I’m a miserable failure, a doughy speck in the eternal void, until She walks by, and from that moment on I’m simply an open vein, life’s hopes bleeding grotesquely into the gutter.

I’m three sheets to the wind already. Maybe you think that has something to do with my agony. Maybe you think she’s not all that. Maybe. Maybe she’s not.

But the story isn’t about her, you see, or the bowel-twisting pain of wanting her; it’s about the bowel-twisting pain of wanting. She was just the vehicle for that want, on that night. That night we’ve all had.

Jovially, you say you haven’t had any such night.

With a sigh that can be heard all the way back to Marc Antony as he begs for release at the feet of Cleopatra, I say, Then you haven’t had any nights at all.

#140

SIX MONTHS TO LIFE

“Did you paint in here?” Ellen struggled to remove her bright red coat as she looked around the office.

“Yes. Well, no. No. I didn’t personally paint…” Dr. Gurley’s goofy smile matched his embarrassed stutter perfectly. He was always so ill at ease, so un-doctor-like, that somehow he made his patients feel at home. As if they were in charge of the visit.

“It looks nice,” Ellen reassured him.

“I’ll be back in just a sec,” the doctor called out. Ellen followed Dr. Gurley’s sole nurse-slash-Girl-Friday back to his sole examining room, and looked for a gown to use for the follow-up. Her bronchitis hadn’t gone away, and every time she launched into song at the nearby cabaret where she was the main attraction, she had a terrible feeling she was causing some sort of abuse to her lungs. She was about to thrust her hand into the good doctor’s sole storage cabinet to fetch her own gown when his nurse stopped her with her own smile.

“You won’t need it today, Ms. Potter. Doctor says the visit won’t go that far.”

Odd, Ellen thought. She sat down and reached for the M&Ms in the front pocket of her purse.

The last yellow M&M (her favorite) was on its way to Ellen’s soft middle before Dr. Gurley knocked on the door and came in. He sat down without a word.

“Doctor, what is it?” Ellen asked. Without a thought, she added, “If I’m gonna die in six months, give it to me straight, but help me breathe in the meantime. I’m only 46, but it feels like I can’t fill my lungs anymore.”

The doctor fiddled with the buttons on his white polo shirt for a minute before clearing his own throat.

“The timing’s right, but the diagnosis is wrong, Ellen. I’m glad you’re sitting down—” his embarrassed stutter returned, ever-so-slightly “—t-tell the truth, I’m glad I’m sitting down.” He stared into space for a moment, then looked straight at the woman whose life was changing forever, starting with his next six words.

“You’re going to have a baby.”

An empty M&Ms bag dropped to Dr. Gurley’s floor.

Ellen didn’t feel quite so in charge of the visit any more.

#139

THE PICKER

11am. She sat in the auction-house, breathless, paddle placed delicately in her lap like a loaded pistol. The assembled crowd—cantankerous pickers, jaded dealers, and fascinated gawkers—retained their usual poses of nonchalance or ignorant excitement as lot after lot fell victim to the auctioneer’s alliterative hawking and firm gavel.

“One-thousan-one-thousand-one-thousan-one—abetta-buy-you’ll-neva-fin—gotta-getit-now—gimme-five-four-THREE-hundred-now—crowd-came-cranky-today—shameful-steal-tosell-likethissss…”

Somebody would always jump in when the mocking started. If she’d seen it once, Iris had seen it a thousand times: the bidding heated up right after the first bidder gave in to the mockery, and the final price would be almost exactly the number they’d started with.

“Sssssold! —brilliant-buyer-beat-youall-at-NINE-hundred-fifTY!”

Most days, you might as well just stick price tags on the stuff. The auctioneers knew exactly what bidders would do with every item.

Most days, being a regular was pretty mundane.

Sometimes, the economy or the weather or the playoffs would change the dynamic. Different people would show up. The collective psyche of the regulars was on edge and they all didn’t “feel like it” at once. The bids would sit in the toilet most of the day, and the auctioneer would give up on witty banter and throw dirty looks as if he didn’t know how he’d feed his kids that week. It might heat up at the end when they all realized they had too much money left in their pockets, or it might be a night to meet the gang at the bar afterwards and commiserate. The hawkers and the hawked-at, playing their familiar game with esoteric rules that varied only by whispers and nods, were all struggling to make their way on the same razor-thin margins. Sometimes, that demands beer.

Iris felt bad for the newbies, though, because sometimes it looked just like that on the outside, but it was really a room full of electric eels. The pros’ head-hanging, lint-picking silence wasn’t a sign of disdain on those days; it kept their concentration from being spoiled while they waited for The One.

The One they all knew the house had missed.

Oh, the hoodoo the pros engaged in on those days! Everybody had their own method of circling their prey. Some watched it from a distance. Looked to see who else was looking. Sized up the competition. Some casually ate a hot dog two feet away from The One, barely glancing at it, yet with every hair on their bodies on end, alert for the slightest motion from other pros. Some raised eyebrows in disgust when others neared The One—the eyebrow of “You gonna bid on that piece of crap? No wonder you can never buy a round when we get out of here.” There was a lot of yawning. Yawning shows everyone else you don’t give a damn. Sorting out who does give a damn from who’s really bored was half the thrill of the sale. You had to be very careful to act as if it was any other day—but the very act of, well, acting, made the whole place reek of tension. Or so you thought…. On those rare days when you were the only one to recognize a gem, while house and all were sleeping on the job, all the posing and prancing could pay off big time. The regulars lived for those days, and relived those days, in endless rounds of bragging among themselves.

She was never much of a people person. She was regular enough to exchange smiles around the auction house, but not regular enough to cause resentment when she sat down, quietly, and placed the paddle in her lap. Wary socializing was the rule for most, trying to feel each other out, but they knew Iris didn’t go in for chit-chat. She was there to buy The One, they all knew, but they’d never know what it was. Iris sat in icy blonde perfection, barely breathing while she absorbed the drama around her—and from the minute she walked in, everyone else seemed to have difficulty breathing, as well.

Iris sat down, made sure she had the auctioneer’s eye, bid on a few small items for herself to test the waters, and waited.

She sent just one text message during the day, reaching into her purse and hitting the send button, pulling out a tissue or a cough drop to mask her actions. The message said, “5 minutes.”

The man or woman she was picking for on that day, casually stepped into the back of the house.

There was no way to guess which newbie was hers, unless you could spot their studied calm, their dead aim on only one item they’d never walked past, and their uncanny ability to win the bid without getting suckered.

7pm. The bidding had nearly died down on an old piece of wrought iron that the auctioneer’s assistant held a bit cautiously above his head. The pointed end had him worried, especially at the end of the day when his arms were getting tired. Just as the gavel was about to fall on the last, 400 dollar bid, a tall man standing at the back of the house in a slightly wet overcoat shook the paddle he held in his crossed arms, ever so slightly.

“Four-hundred-fitty-toyousir, any-more?” The auctioneer never looked surprised when bidding re-started as he was ready to call a piece. It was part of the game, he knew, to act so uninterested that you couldn’t be bothered to bid ‘til the last second, but when a new face played the game that well, it was a bit odd.

At four thousand, he did raise his eyebrow slightly. Dealers rarely kept bidding with a determined outsider on their backs—“Live to bid another day,” goes the motto of any sane professional, but this time was different. A third bidder got in for a few, realizing he must be missing something. The waters were a bit too hot, though, and he jumped back out at 10 thousand. Looked like somebody was going to get suckered. The room was completely still, save the nodding heads of two men.

“14-5-going-once, going-twice—Jerry, you got any more in you?—no?—then-tothemaninthegreycoatfor-14-thousand-5-hundred… (big pause for effect)… sssssSOLD!”

The next month, the true auction hounds read it in the trade paper—Marlinspike authenticated from the Mayflower sells for 85,000 dollars at Christie’s Americana sale.

The One! Stolen from under their noses! Not bad for the man in the grey coat and his ten minutes’ work.

And not a bad cut for Iris, the picker who never settled for razor-thin margins.

#138

SPRING BREAK

We watched the bonefish all day, skimming along near the edge of the beautiful white sands of the beachfront house Mom and Aunt Mae rented for the week, every year at this same time.

Those fish just love to play in the shallow waters of the Keys. We were lucky to have a rock big enough for the three of us there, grounded at the side of a tiny inlet. For the first, energetic hour, we’d alternate between adopting the shiny fish and creating catacombs under the rock for them to hide from the midday sun, and complaining about their ungrateful nature (they never used our excavations! the wretches!), and stirring up their pool with our feet, engineering a maelstrom to show off our displeasure.

After that, we let them have their way, as they have for millennia, and they returned to their business, living artwork for bored preteens. My cousins and I sat and admired their silver and blue colors and their slick swimming skills, told ridiculously tall tales, and acquired matching sunburns.

From their perch 50 feet away on the house’s deck, we imagined Mom, always the level-headed sister, listening to Aunt Mae prattle on in her neurotic manner, and resolved not to go back until our skin blistered or until somebody got hungry. (Must have priorities!) We’d rather hear our own voices, each claiming to have to most ogre-like gym teacher or the music teacher whose waspishness drove us the craziest, with his insistence on perfected scales—“Your submediant! It’s horrrrrrendous!!” while dipping our toes in April’s icy ocean waters, than flagellate ourselves by listening to Aunt Mae perfectionate her accusations against Uncle Chris for seven long days.

My cousins probably had a better idea than I did of why he was such an easy target, but the way Mom would repeatedly get half a sentence out on our drive back, then simply sigh as her conclusion, I got the feeling that picking the wrongdoer from the two of them wasn’t quite so easy.

Later on, as I got older, I sat up on the deck more often, and went down to visit the bonefish less. What a terrible disappointment it was, to sit there and apply my sunscreen (blistered skin is such a drag!), and discover there were no juicy tidbits to be had. Most of what Mom and Aunt Mae were talking about was how they wished they were young and aimless and energetic enough to go make chaos for the fish, just like us kids.

I guess that’s enough to make any grownup sigh all the way home from spring break.

#137

ETCHED ON THE CASE OF MY HEART

The scars are still there, plain as day
etched on the case of my heart

I remember the day you stood behind me
your head cockeyed, you made mocking smileys
in the mirror; we laughed ‘til we fluttered soft, back
into bed

Life never was peaches and dreams with you
In lucky times, jubilee lasted a week or two,
in the flash of a quark you were under a bottle and
out of your head

Two crazy psychopaths, believin’ in love
with problems we thought we could rise above
We pledged to forever; at least one of us
meant what we said

I loved you most of all
when you were quiet and small
You drank your weakness away;
slept it off while I
stroked your hair

I packed up to leave in our second fall
One surreptitious glance back, got stopped in the hall
You begged me to stay
with blue miracles
that turned out grey

I had too much empathy, all the times I cried
I’d gotten used to my prison, or Lord knows I tried
but you’d be holding me still in that jail if I
hadn’t said,

“Babe, I love you most of all
when you’re quiet and small
You drink your demons away;
sleep it off while I
stroke your hair”

Maybe I’ll never find love any other way
But it don’t compute to love, that hope and pain
The scars are still there,
and they’re still so plain
‘cause they’re etched on the case of my heart

#136

INDIGNITIES AND IMPRUDENCE

The imported lilac-colored polo shirt his wife gave him for Christmas last December made him stand out on the course, but no one seemed to mind.

Out loud, anyway; folks hardly ever voice their sartorial complaints to a guy who’s six-foot-seven and outweighs ‘em by fifty pounds. Gerry could never quite tell the difference between acceptance and deference, in that respect.

He reached into his bag and pulled out a fresh pack of golf tees, branded with the logo of his new client; a disturbing image that looked something like half a brassiere stared back at him as he placed one in the ground. If the shirt weren’t incongruous enough with his impressive size and dark, scowling looks, now he’d be a country-club-spokesman for Belle’s Beautiful Breast Pumps.

Such are the indignities of being a p.r. flack.

His hands dry as parchment, Gerry leaned over the waiting ball, took a heartfelt swing, and hung his head as both ball and club somersaulted into the woods to the left of the fairway.

Belle leaned in, providing a view of her own inspirational breasts, and breathed a sympathetic “Oh, no!” in his ear. Nibbling said ear, very gently, with her red-satin lips.

Such are the indignities…

#135

MOOD INDIGO PLAYS

Mood Indigo plays. Face of alabaster peeks in my ersatz office door, blonde strands across the forehead hiding her concern. Are you all right?
Don’t know.
Sandwiches later? Okay.
Okay’s the best I can muster. She understands.

Motorboat screams past the summer house. Where are you headed? Wish I could go, too.
Like a cartoon character I fluctuate between the punk anger of that speedboat and the delicious languor of our own canoe.
I used to handle moods better. At least I think I did.
A mere sunspot’s difference in sunlight seems capable of tipping my world on its side, now. A drop of rain is devastation.
No serendipity brings solace as I walk along our stretch of beach.
Honestly,
I’d rather not walk its warm, soft sands any more.

My office, once a haven of reality here on this island of pleasure, holds no thrill;
contains no rage.
My woman, my lifemate, she watches
from our whitewashed porch
as beams of frenzied fury escape the battens of this 10×12 space
and bolt to touch the sky.
Never scolds.
Never questions my ego. I am the only entity permitted this electric wrath.
Never asks why she can’t have a hugs for the loss of our baby, too.
Knows
I have no hugs to give.

#134

SPOILED, RICH, AND SELFISH—INTERNATIONAL FIXATIONS

We put them into office
then line ‘em up against the wall
We want ‘em to make headway
but cause *us* no pain at all
The only ones who make it are connected, rich and fat
then we wonder why the mess we’re in gets worse, or best, stays flat

Grandmother’s great Depression
made us crave self-satisfaction
We don’t want to have to ration
Let’s make our kids pay for our actions
Accomodation
Justification
Not allowed serious propositions
All suggestions
No ideation
Still can’t get cooperation
So we lower expectations
with unattractive implications
I vote you in, one stipulation
You fix it & give me exclusions

Seems tempting to make allegations
it’s alluring to collect ovations
convincing some with pontification
and punishments with no repercussions
Instead give debt consolidation
to the biggest corporations
Wealth progession—
the grand seduction
Intoxication
with accumulation
No-restriction-
compensation
Exploitation
Self-congratulation
Raw ambition
Status preservation
Bet one day I’ll be in that position
Won’t stop your train from leaving the station
but I wonder why the mess we’re in gets worse, or best, stays flat

Allocation
for modernization
Globalization
Infestation
Innovation
without conservation
Construction
Destruction
Deforestation
Devastation
No mobilization
to save civilization
Minimization
of the cannibalization
Consolation
in preservation
of tiny wildlife reservations
So much is disinformation
You appealing, for my persuasion
Are *we* headed for obliteration?
Can’t look at it without emotion
Just put it up for more discussion
Do you wonder why the mess we’re in gets worse, or best, stays flat?

Administrations, corporations,
institutions, nascent nations,
don’t focus on my contradictions
I think I want a revolution
if it won’t pinch my remuneration
& causes me no complications
I do see its sultry charm
though I like things as they are

So I let you out of obligations
then blame it on some other faction
I’m in full participation
but that’s not my interpretation
It’s far too late for hesitation
and this whiny vocalization

I let you have your way
and though I won’t say so today
You let me have mine.

That’s prob’ly why the mess we’re in gets worse, or best, stays flat—
Self-deception’s where it’s at

#133

POSTSCRIPT TO A POSTCARD

Life’s like this, yeah.

How did we become intertwined? Do you remember? I certainly don’t. Whether fate or happenstance, here you are, and here I am watching you take off. Not in the sense of exodus, you understand—though I believe you’ve done a bit o’ that as well—no. Less drama, more buoyancy. I see you now taking flight, as I always knew you should.

It’s been in your nature all along. You only needed to stop seeing the flaws and begin to mold your raw strengths into genius—to stand on ground where you could see the wide plains waiting for the kiss of your wings.

Well, I can’t trace the series of events that’s kept me, keeping my eye on you. And I’m getting far too mushy about it. (Yeesh!) So call it synchronicity. And a very happy sync, indeed.

Because I told you, Sean. Your words ARE art.
Congratulations. I wish you smiles.

#132

TOO LATE I KNOCKED

Too late! I knocked.

I thought the better of it afterwards, but afterwards is always too late.

You answered the door in jeans and not-much-else, looking like you had something in you that you hadn’t quite slept off, and I was interrupting.

“They delivered the wrong mail to me,” I said. “Your mail, I mean. They delivered it to me. Here.” I thrust a couple of letters in your hand and practically ran away.

I used to be comfortable here. I’d rented this beach house for years and saw the same people, every year, until you showed up this June. I’ll admit it, you were too handsome for me. It made me nervous, now, to take a run down to the beach without a coverup. I discovered a sudden need for a newer swimsuit and cuter flip-flops. I even checked my makeup in the mirror before I went down the street to get milk.

Who wears makeup at the beach? Silly girls who grow up to be shy women, I suppose, if they find themselves next door to strangers whose presence makes them melt.

After that day you twisted yourself into a pretzel to get to know me. Me! At first I was sure you had the wrong chick. I pinched myself more than once to be sure I wasn’t dreaming you. I know I’m great in a lot of ways, but I don’t normally get attention from sandy-haired beach bums with secret lives they’re trying to escape. Your long, lean form striding over the dunes toward me as I read a book or took a dip began to seem right after just a few days. This was the summer I’d always wished for when I sent in my ever-skyrocketing rent for the beach house, getting to know you… as much as you wanted to be known… hanging out, getting friendly, eating pizza, just relaxing with—I’ll say it—some wonderful eye candy.

Too late… I knocked.

If I hadn’t had that glass of wine after you left that night in early July, maybe I’d never have crossed the driveway to your door at midnight. I knew it was way too late but now days had stretched into weeks… we seemed to have such a good foundation, here in our fantasy-land, away from real life… guess I was wondering if we could make this summer friendship into a little fling.

I’m not usually like that. But summers slip by fast, and my last glass of wine was gone. I think it dared me to knock on your door.

I watched you stand in the doorway, sad-eyed lord of your (sand)castle. It seemed to take forever for you to decide what to do with me. Finally, you invited me in, and we very, very gently… gingerly?… got just a bit more friendly. It was the first time since handing you the mail that I felt like I should run away again. It wasn’t just that you were taking things at a gentleman’s pace. There was something in you that I wasn’t supposed to know.

I pushed the idea away and enjoyed our time for what it was. I didn’t expect a ring. I didn’t expect to invade your world and I probably didn’t want you to invade mine. If you were reluctant, then I’d back off. Every day was still more beautiful for spending part of it with you, dancing under the improbably huge, wrought-iron chandelier in your kitchen, watching old movies on my sofa, listening to you muse on politics or opera or your favorite scene from The Godfather.

Every day, we watched the stars come out to dance above our heads at nightfall.

Every day I lay with my head on your chest and breathed happy, ignorant sighs. I was more content than I’d ever been. Of course, you must be, too.

At the end of the month, you had to go back to the city for a few days. You had some business to take care of. We both knew that days and forevers of apart-ness would come. I hope I wasn’t too calm about the goodbye. I was still trying to take this as a beautiful fling. You were still unknowable in so many ways—I was never sure if you agreed, or if you wished I wasn’t so casual. Or some third thing altogether. You’d be back Sunday, maybe; maybe I’d ask you if I was reading you right then.

Sunday you did come back. We had a picnic on the beach, tried to decide if the stars had shifted in the eons since we’d seen each other. You were quiet as we watched them dance, still except for the tears I discreetly tried not to notice. You’d tell me when it was time. Maybe.

Monday I ate breakfast alone. Figured you were sleeping off the drive.

Went to the beach alone, too. Brought a book and actually got to read it. You rarely left me alone long enough to get through a whole chapter. I do so hate to pry. I’d leave you alone a while longer. Felt like a nag even thinking of going up to your door, but at dinnertime… well, if you’d gone back to the city without telling me I’d better find out now and start steeling my heart. I put the book down on my kitchen counter. Got a coverup for my swimsuit. Put on my cute new flip-flops. Falling apart already, the dang things. Walked across the driveway to your front door.

Too late, I knocked.

Afterwards is always too late.

It was hard to explain to the EMTs why I was in your kitchen that evening, staring at your body swinging gently in the summer breeze coming through the patio doors. “I thought we might order a pizza” sounded so lame as they cut you down from the chandelier. I think they wanted me to leave the room, but I wanted to make sure they treated you well. You were still just as unknowable, but I knew that you deserved to be held… more gently than they would.

More gently, I suppose,  than I knew how.

#131

TRY “YOO-HOO.” THEY LIKE THAT.

Must every word be profound stuff? I work all day, y’know. Sometimes I can’t catch the energy to test my breathing with a blow to a candle, let alone block your view or log a mile in pursuit of you, to be certain I’ve got your attention. I’ve attached my very finest “Hey, you” to the wave and the jumping up and down, all in vain—

—so what the heck do I have to do to hail a cab around here?

#130

THE FUTURE BUTTERFLY

While the caterpillar sews her tiny featherbed
Does she think about the offspring who will live after she’s dead?
Does the seamstress wash her clothes
Between colorful rainbows
And envy all of those who don’t cocoon until they shed?
The greens and greys she’s laundered
Her time is nearly squandered
It’s all improvisation
No calligraphy, no invitation
She must enter her creation though she’s had no time to wander
A placebo pill would help her
To get past the helter-skelter
Feeling she’s forgotten something
Left iron on and kettle screaming
Hot water on her reds is bleeding
While she sews up past her head

Time to sleep inside her shelter
Now let nothing more be said.

#129

I DON’T KNOW, MAYBE SO

“Ah, yer full of malarkey, Ben Tierney, so y’are.” I was moving my effects around the tiny flat Ben and I were letting for the summer in Waterford, and listening to him go on about a girl he thinks I like back home. I was in no mood to listen, but that hadn’t a cheese in Cheshire’s chance of stopping him from jawing on.

A few irritated words from me, was only validation for his epic tale. “See there, now, I knew you had it in for her. Bridget Flynn’s a fine one and everybody in the village is waitin’ for you to speak to her.”

“Maybe so, maybe they are. But I’m nowt speakin’ to anyone, Ben. I want t’ finish this internship without another thought of girls, get my last credits, and head of to New York for a real job. Tha’s what’ll give me glee. That and you helpin’ with the move-in, here. Let’s make a bit of progress, can’t we?” I threw a sack of bedthings at him. “This ain’t mine, you old hag, did yer mum send you with lovely purple linens?’

Faced with the lavender sheets, Ben finally left the subject of Bridget alone. “Ah’m throwing ‘em out, first paycheck, all right? They was blue ‘til I warshed ‘em wrong, and now they’d sooner suit a sister I don’t have. Quiet down about ‘em.”

Of course, Ben would do no such thing. Like me, he’d let the sheets or any other silliness stand to incriminate his terrible skills with the wash while he sent every penny he could home this summer. My mum and da had helped in any way they could while I went through university. Would I spend on a bedsheet even if mine were the purple ones?

Only if there was any potential that Bridget Flynn might have a peek at it.

Well, it was true I had an eye for her. My da was keen that I should speak to her as well as bloody “everybody,” but Bridget was too busy with anything but me. It was a small town and she had bigger plans. She seemed to think I should have all manner of whispered stories of girls from university. Seemed a mite put off that I didn’t, to be truthful. I was off to New York because everybody knew that an engineer in small-town Ireland was like a fish in the queen’s bonnet, eyed with terror and a damned sight uncomfortable as well, but not because I wanted to leave home or have adventures. I was a disappointment to the prettiest green eyes in all the south, and her displeasure affected me something terrible.

Aye, it seemed I’d set her up on a plinth long ago when we were kids, with her alabaster face and mocking green eyes, my sculpture of home and hearth as I wished it; though I tried and again to tell “everybody in the village” that I’d have none of her, it was she who’d have none o’ me and I knew it.

I’d no idea what to do about that, and if you must know, I bored myself to death with my mooning. So I’d have my summer in Waterford, easy and free, then off to Amerikay it was.

#128

TERRIBLY TRUE STORY

She was a high-maintenance woman and Evan knew it from the start.

One assistant spread out a beautiful kilim across the width of the studio for her to prowl on. Took them three weeks to find the right one. The walls were hung with a silky rainbow of colors. The client could hardly wait to see the photos of her feline limbs stretched out toward his product; he envisioned a pan-Asian look for the background. She whined that the expensive kilim looked filthy, and that it would never show her legs off to their best effect. The rug was out in the first five minutes of the shoot.

Another assistant took her abuse about the lighting arrangement, rearranging hoods to rake pleasingly across her well-defined mandible. They’d be charging overtime for all the fuss, for sure. The camera was set up before she arrived—never keep a diva waiting! —but now Evan had to wander around with his tripod, looking for a better location to suit that jawbone. Two assistants were obviously too busy to do it for him, and the third had to run out to get coffee that better suited the “lady.”

Term used veeeery loosely.

Was her voice still ringing in his ear or was she not done complaining? Third assistant returned as fast as her little legs could carry her, offered the choice of cream and sugar from the company kitchen with her last ounce of tenderness, and ended up drinking it herself. How vile of her not to have skim soy milk on hand for her majesty’s delicate tummy?

There was nothing delicate about this lady. Evan thought about smashing his camera and giving up on his life’s work. He’d always felt the stories about models were more apocryphal than fact-based—in fact, most days his work was good fun—but the stories about bosses wives who insist they can be more fabulous than the professionals

Those stories are terribly true.

#127

DINNER FOR ONE. WITH LEFTOVERS.

Thanksgiving dinner was looking grim. The gravy was made, but there was no need for trim

mings since no one would make it to table that night. A blistering blizzard had stopped every flight.

While gravity poured out a tempest most torrid

our thoughts turned to sultry vacations in Florid

a. Let’s be there November next’s end.

Mom called us, me and my tiger striped kitten: “Thank goodness I remembered to pack all our mittens.

It’s frigid out here in the lounge at the airport, they won’t let us leave—roads are only last resort

for ambulances desperate to get through the white.

Gran’s getting peaked, her diabetes is wicked when everything offered to eat isn’t right.

You’d best eat without us, hon, sorry you made a ton, but at least

if the plows can’t get you right out, you’ll have plenty to eat for three nights.”

I hung up the phone. I looked at my cat. I looked out at the terrible snows.

Cut a hunk of the bird, grabbed a piece of the pie, and reminded me—

family stuff usually blows.

#126

VERY PARENT’S NIGHTMAREI got a call from the school. The one we all dread.

“Mrs. Trembelara? It’s Mr. Maral. I need to talk to you about your daughter’s behavior in class today. Can you two meet me at the school this afternoon? I’ll be downstairs in the basement, in the old open classroom. All the way past the gym and the dressing rooms, she’ll know the way.”

You don’t say no to your daughter’s new homeroom teacher when something’s gone wrong enough for a face-to-face meeting, and it’s only three weeks into the school year. I apologized. For what, I didn’t yet know… at least for meeting him for the first time under such circumstances. He took it pretty smoothly. Minutes later, though she’d just stepped off the bus, we got right into the car and drove downtown to the school, with me quizzing all the way.

“What’d you do?”

“Nothing.”

My baby girl—once my squishy little koala bear, so eager to please—entered her teens and became as prickly as a cactus. It was exhausting for me as a single mom, and deep down I knew it was painful for her as well because she missed our easy closeness, but I didn’t have a lot of time for reflection right then. I’m about to be called out as a bad parent and we’re going ‘round in verbal circles.

“You’re positive? He wants to see us right away for nothing?”

“I guess.”

“Hard to believe…”

“Mom! I didn’t do anything! Not today and not any other day! I don’t know what he’s talking about, okay!”

It wasn’t really okay, but we both knew we’d find out what it was, soon enough.

We got to the school and made our way down the wide cement staircase to the basement. Acreage was at a premium in this city, so rather than build out when they wanted to expand, the school had simply dug deeper. In the fifties when they started expanding, it probably made sense as an emergency bomb shelter, as well; in the sixties when they finished it, that threat was nearly ignored, but the school had the nicest walk-out basement classrooms, ice rink, and gymnasium you can imagine, and a bill for all the digging that they were still paying off when the Soviet Union crumbled.

All the way past the gym and the dressing rooms. Teenage boys fresh from hockey practice, some carrying their pads on their still-fragile shoulders, some using squeeze balls to strengthen their muscles with hands wrinkled like California raisins from too-long showers, spilled out of the locker rooms as the two of us marched unhappily down the hall. At the end of the hall the old hippie dream, a huge “open” classroom for kids to wander and drink at the fountain of knowledge as they pleased, beckoned. Partitions had been put up in a couple of the corners, a tired acknowledgment that kids don’t really learn best that way. Over the partition walls we could hear drama practice and yearbook planning, competing for our auditory attention; since most of the room was still open, the visuals thankfully won out and we ignored the high-volume battling of teen voices behind the walls.

“It looks like Science Club over there,” my daughter whispered to me, pointing to a group trying to use a flashlight to illuminate a four-foot-tall lighthouse, “and over there, maybe homework help. Over there—there’s a bunch of people at that table by the door—maybe Mr. Maral is there?”

She couldn’t spot him, so with all the initiative of her age, she did nothing. She stood helplessly, claiming she’d keep a lookout. I went over to the table to ask if anyone had seen Mr. Maral. One boy volunteered helpfully that Mr. Maral is never there, and maybe we got it confused where we were supposed to meet.

“I think we’ll just wait a while for him,” I said in response, and the kids and their two unhelpful teachers gave a collective shrug of indifference.

We paused awkwardly in the center of the room, my daughter and I, for about five minutes. I mumbled something about how it couldn’t be that big a deal if he couldn’t remember to show up… and found myself in the middle of “I told you, I didn’t do anything” again, when a familiar face popped up in front of us.

“Mrs. Trembelara! How are you? What can I do for you two?” asked Mrs. Gerdan, the ninth grade History teacher and everybody’s favorite at the school.

“We were supposed to meet Mr. Maral here,” I said. “It’s my first…conference… with him.” My daughter glared at me, a warning not to mention her alleged bad behavior, and wandered reluctantly away to the homework help table. We don’t take a break from each other often enough. That’s why I get the rolling eyeballs all the time. Maybe she’ll catch a few pointers while I talk to someone I recognize, I thought.

“Are you sure it was Mr. Maral?” (Another person questioning me about this call. What gives?) “He left about noon. Had a funeral to go to. I’m surprised he’d come back today,” Mrs. Gerdan said. She kept me company while we waited a little longer, talking about her history students this year, how much she missed my daughter now that she was a tenth grader, remembering back with incredible clarity to a couple of projects she’d done the year before…. It’s amazing what teachers can remember about the good kids. I didn’t even remember the details of those projects like she did, and I was there while she sweated them out (‘til midnight, usually, unless it was ‘til 3a.m….).

“Yeah. She’s a good kid,” I heard myself say out loud. At that moment I knew that whatever Mr. Maral wanted to say to me could wait. It was time for the two of us to go home.

“Did you see where she went?” I asked Mrs. Gerdan. We both looked around. I called out for her (in the I-don’t-want-to-embarrass-my-teen way that we all learn), but no annoyed head popped up. Mrs. Gerdan looked into the drama practice and yearbook areas; I moved from Science Club to homework, where she was headed when Mrs. Gardan and I started talking. The teacher at the homework table finally took an interest. “Hey, people. Listen up. Has anybody seen her daughter?” he yelled across the cavernous classroom, his booming voice adding to my anxiety. There was a small buzz of mumbling and looking around uselessly as if she might be under a notebook or attached to a neighbor’s back from the groups of usually-disinterested teens, followed by a low chorus of No, don’t think sos.

A small kid sitting near where I was standing at the homework table looked up at the teacher with steady blue eyes. With a raise of her delicate eyebrows, she tipped her head, ever so slightly, toward the exit next to their table.

A stream of light was shooting across their worn carpeting. The door was slightly ajar.

“I didn’t see her. But there was that guy…” Her voice trailed off.

“What guy?” asked the teacher.

“He tried to help me with my math. But he was worse at geometry than I am,” she said in a voice that sent chills through me

“The other man at this table… who was he?”

Was I screeching externally or only in my guts? I don’t know. The teacher gave me a shrug, saying something about how it’s nice when they don’t leave him alone to do this job, but I was already at the door. I ripped it open and scanned the schoolyard as the kids at the homework table pressed me from behind.

Nothing.

No one. I called her name louder; I cried her name softly; but I could not move my feet from that horrible doorway.

The kids rushed out around my disintegrating body, to examine the obvious emptiness of the yard. I could see that they wanted to help.

I could see that they didn’t want to go too far, either. Some of them would probably have liked to call their mothers right then, big bold teens though they were.

I heard someone bark to call up to the office and call for her on the loudspeaker. Mrs. Gerdan put a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” she whispered. When she tried to direct me back inside, I felt razors cutting into my organs from every direction. I would not leave that spot! I would scream until I died of it! I would never blink again, so I could keep looking out there for her! I would…

“But I watch her like a hawk! She’s my baby! Where ARE you, baby?”

#125

#124

#123

#122

#121

#120

#119

#118

#117

#116

#115

#114
IT’S HENRY

Ooof.

He heard her, he heard her… his wife had wandered in three or four times already, making louder grunts each time, bumping around loudly for effect, trying to get him up without… trying to get him up. Her “subtlety” was a killer.

The kids were already nattering away, down the hall. He could hear their muffled voices, begging for breakfast to hurry, and grilling Mama— “Why do we always have to wait for Papa, even today?” —but he didn’t care. His back was sore. His eyes were glued shut. And when all was said and done, he was just so damned TIRED.

Oooooof.

He rolled over and tried to pretend he didn’t know he was holding everyone up. For all the fuss, you’d think the entire town was in real danger without him. This was his lair, the one place where he thought he should to be able to shout, “I’m tired and I want to be left alone” on this ridiculously icy day, but it was clear that no one else thought so. Within his own home he was amassing a world of resentment, and on the outside, just the world… well, he had a job to do. His conscience pricked at him, albeit sleepily… lot of nerve he had, with so many out of work, to wish he could shove this job back in the faces of those dull, black-suited gnomes he was working for.

But he wasn’t disabled, just disheartened—so at last Henry, poor sequel to their last hire, sat himself up, rubbed his red-rimmed eyes with stiff fists, and got ready to face the world.

“Smile, Papa,” said his eldest as he headed for the door. Easy for her to say. She got breakfast and now the world’s rosy to her.

“Try to look… a bit more whimsical, Papa,” said Mama. Whimsical? How the heck do I look whimsical?

Better figure it out, because by the time he got near the front door he could feel the greedy hands of the gnomes reaching in to for him to give them his best performance…

“And here he is, folks, Punxutawney Phil!”

Henry. Punxutawney F-ing Henry, was all he could think, while the camera glared at him in the bitterly cold, early morning light.

#113
STOP IN FOR COOKIES

They left the little house standing there, right at the asphalt’s edge, when they built the freeway through town. They say old Mrs. Larssen never even considered moving.

We’d speed by, in our minivans and our SUVs, and those of us who were old enough to remember when Mrs. Larssen’s place was at the edge of the town square, we’d look over once in a while and see her dog, ever-puzzled by the whizzing vehicles, sitting up on his yellow-lab haunches on the front porch where Mrs. Larssen used to greet us as we walked to school.

“Nice day,” she’d say, no matter the weather. “Think I’ll bake a little something today.”

Those were the days when we raced to get out of class, because if you were lucky enough to walk past Mrs. Larssen’s on your way home, you did not want to be unlucky enough to get there after the pepparkakor were gone. I can still taste those melt-in-your-mouth cookies now. She had a cow and a few chickens in a tiny farmyard out back, and we’d have fresh, warm milk with our cookies till we thought we might have trouble fitting back through the front door. Angels helped her bake the pepparkakor, she said, and I believed her. We were always full of grace when we left Mrs. Larssen’s house.

If there was a Mr. Larssen, I never knew of anyone who’d seen him. It was hard to imagine her as someone’s wife, even though she was everybody’s grandmother. She was just too strong and independent to live under anyone else’s code. People said she’d been a real hero during the war, keeping the town running rubber drives and metal collections and anything else they asked of her. Maybe Mr. Larssen was Over There. Maybe that was why she worked so tirelessly… though I always guessed it was because of her love of our sleepy town, not her love of country or victory.

Well, when the freeway came through town, she still had her quota of champions of her cause on the town council—some remembered her stalwart heroism, some remembered her pepparkakor—and they never did send the letter they sent to every other business and homeowner on the square, telling them it was time to sell their land to the state for pennies, in the name of progress. No, they never even considered asking her, and though she watched friends and neighbors moving off with sadness, she never even considered offering to move.

In the name of progress, we race out of our sleepy town, bereft of its once-bustling town square; race to the tunnels of the Big City and the strange comfort of trampling incognito over wide cement sidewalks for our pay. But some of us look over at the asphalt’s edge as we hit the gas, Mrs. Larssen’s yellow lab reminding us that warm hearts still beat in that little house… and once in a while, we wish we could stop in for cookies.

#113
STOP IN FOR COOKIES

They left the little house standing there, right at the asphalt’s edge, when they built the freeway through town. They say old Mrs. Larssen never even considered moving.

We’d speed by, in our minivans and our SUVs, and those of us who were old enough to remember when Mrs. Larssen’s place was at the edge of the town square, we’d look over once in a while and see her dog, ever-puzzled by the whizzing vehicles, sitting up on his yellow-lab haunches on the front porch where Mrs. Larssen used to greet us as we walked to school.

“Nice day,” she’d say, no matter the weather. “Think I’ll bake a little something today.”

Those were the days when we raced to get out of class, because if you were lucky enough to walk past Mrs. Larssen’s on your way home, you did not want to be unlucky enough to get there after the pepparkakor were gone. I can still taste those melt-in-your-mouth cookies now. She had a cow and a few chickens in a tiny farmyard out back, and we’d have fresh, warm milk with our cookies till we thought we might have trouble fitting back through the front door. Angels helped her bake the pepparkakor, she said, and I believed her. We were always full of grace when we left Mrs. Larssen’s house.

If there was a Mr. Larssen, I never knew of anyone who’d seen him. It was hard to imagine her as someone’s wife, even though she was everybody’s grandmother. She was just too strong and independent to live under anyone else’s code. People said she’d been a real hero during the war, keeping the town running rubber drives and metal collections and anything else they asked of her. Maybe Mr. Larssen was Over There. Maybe that was why she worked so tirelessly… though I always guessed it was because of her love of our sleepy town, not her love of country or victory.

Well, when the freeway came through town, she still had her quota of champions of her cause on the town council—some remembered her stalwart heroism, some remembered her pepparkakor—and they never did send the letter they sent to every other business and homeowner on the square, telling them it was time to sell their land to the state for pennies, in the name of progress. No, they never even considered asking her, and though she watched friends and neighbors moving off with sadness, she never even considered offering to move.

In the name of progress, we race out of our sleepy town, bereft of its once-bustling town square; race to the tunnels of the Big City and the strange comfort of trampling incognito over wide cement sidewalks for our pay. But some of us look over at the asphalt’s edge as we hit the gas, Mrs. Larssen’s yellow lab reminding us that warm hearts still beat in that little house… and once in a while, we wish we could stop in for cookies.

#112
ORANGE, PINK, BROWN, WHITE, GREEN*

“Ochre. I definitely want the kitchen to be oche. Not too far toward topaz, though. That would be silly. The entry hall—apple blossom. Anything else would be too much, because the living room is going to be truffle-colored—go all the way with it, and make sure it’s a very smoky brown, you know—and that’s about as much boldness as the downstairs needs.”

Though I was not at all ambiguous at all in my description, my painter looked discombobulated. I smiled the most understanding, sprite-like smile I could manage, and when he seemed to warm to me again, we ran over the colors for the upstairs—pelican, caramel, sea salt, spring chive, maize. Thank goodness he gave me not a whinny of disapproval—I had too many things on my mind for that. Instead, with a wise sigh like a samurai before battle (with my walls!), my painter looked at me and intoned, gnomically, “You interior designers really know how to make a house a home.”

And so we do.  

*With apologies to Muriel Blandings, who preferred red, green, blue, yellow, white.

#111

SUMMER, 2000

Grey-blue larkspurs kiss the rain along the garden path this chilly morning, funnelling me to the back yard to cradle my morning coffee (a touch of sugar, no milk, thanks to my lactose intolerance) among the birds who love my handmade birdfeeders as much as my heart’s work, my flowers, at this time of year. Crass blue jays throw birdseed that doesn’t meet their high standards to the ground, where fat little sparrows, bundled in their brown feathers like ewoks, creep along for an easy feast. Pusillanimous chickadees tread at the edges of one feeder waiting for the jays to finish before taking their daintier meals. My favorite, an Oriole daddy, treks through a daisy-edged mudslide to locate worms for his noisy chicks; like a castrated opera singer, he chirps out to them from below, “Poplolly, Poplolly, back soon.” I’ll miss them when I’m gone.

With the last sips of coffee, I rise from my stone bench, pick a few naughty bits of clover from inside the east flowerbed’s edge, and head inside to finish packing.

#110

JOAN’S ON BREAK

Under the aegis of the Physics Department, Joan toiled for years on a revamped version of the Tesla coil. She was sure that old Nicola was looking down on her. He’d been on to something—his grand ego and his rampant paranoia aside. Tesla believed we could communicate far beyond the boundaries of this planet if only he could create a revolutionary new source of power,* and his amazing coils, some as large as whole rooms, were the first step in his grand design.

Afraid of everything from canids to dustmites to Edison, his former employer, Tesla evetually lost the intellectual race in his race to the brink of insanity. Joan had the benefit of modern medicine to keep her taphephobia at bay… more like an amusing idiosyncracy than a career-ending character flaw… and so even in those dark, late nights alone in the lab, she was able to remember that the walls would not close in on her—and keep their vital, century-delayed work alive.

Joan was a wisp of a thing, and the object of many professors’ kind concern when she drove herself too hard, which was always. With her panoptic view of the possibilities in modernizing Tesla’s work, it was only that Joan often felt she had no time to stop.

Only? Joan rarely socialized; rarely stopped to chat except if a student needed her help (must inspire the next generation); in fact, without imitated brass bands and occasionally a real semaphore brought into the lab by a sympathetic coworker, Joan rarely even stopped to eat. This worried… everybody but Joan.

After all, her mind was still fecund and she managed to keep alive one of the last quasi-eleemosynary positions at the university, but all that could change in an instant if her progress wasn’t fast enough. Why would she let up?

“Pure verve,” said the department Chair at her funeral. “That’s what she survived on so long. She worried about the walls closing in on her, but it was her body that did. She did physics a great service in her 20 years of tireless research, but in all those years, she didn’t do herself much justice.

“I picture her now, sipping an espresso on a cloud next to Nicola Tesla, hatching a plot to implant their obsessions in some fresh young mind. We all loved Joan dearly, but a message to the next obsessive scientist, if you’re among us today—rememberto take a break now and then.”

#109

TWO SIDES TO EVERY SONG, MAYBE…

Bereft of his uke, Bobby laid down in a meadow deep in the Keystone State and tried to create a tune for a couple of canticles from Job that seemed appropriate to the moment. His girl hadn’t just told him off, she’d changed the locks on her door and obstreperously refused him even a quarter-hour’s amnesty to collect his belongings.

He tried to charm her with his insipid little, “Oh, honey, you don’t believe all that talk,” whined through the keyhole, but his plea languished in the unseasonably cold air outside her door and so did he ’til he decided she could keep the ukelele and his collection of Neil Young albums, too. He had a life and he wasn’t going to waste it on regrets, darn it.

Like a Huguenot beginning a pilgrimage, he left the little town where everybody’s nose was always in his business (and the two women who thought he was their business) and drove just as far as his F150 would take him.

15 miles. ‘Til he ran out of gas. Shouldn’t have been so stupid about not wanting to give another red cent to the town gossip at the Gas’N’Go.

Well, the meadow was good enough for tonight, and tomorrow would figure itself out. A gentle zephyr passed over him, tickling his nose with sweet summer scents as he tried again to make up a tune for one of Job’s woeful laments. It was then that he remembered that he was allergic to the grass pollens he was lolling in.

Achoo!

#108

THANG

Hand me down my walking shoes
No rootbeer float can chase the blues
Uh uh
I can’t trust you no more
You’re despicable, and I’m
Heading for the door
Way down in town they all talk about you
Took an awful long time for me to hear the news
Oh no
Love ain’t s’posed to be a chore
They recommend I get out
And put the metal to the floor

Take this racecar just as far
as I
can get
from you
Don’t try your insouciant excuses I can’t
hear you
from another
woman’s room

I was headed for a spectacular crash
‘Til this morning I got out and now I won’t look back
Aw yeah
I don’t need to keep score, but
Just for bonus points
I think that girl’s an ugly

Thang.

Hand me down my walking shoes
I sip a rootbeer float just as long as I choose
You know
This day don’t look bad as before
You’re despicable,
But I don’t give a darn no more

#107

CRUSHED

What a wastrel was our man Bush
Though he did put a wondrous hush
Over D.C. and all of its slush
With his promise to flush
Evil out of the bush
Swooping through the Middle East with a woosh

Forget the debt
Too late to percolate
We were not meant to think
About whether such plans stink
Of a man who’s lived life in the plush
Caring not of the cost of his rush
Both the dead and the debt-laden, crushed—
Now shush!

#106

#105

#104

#103

#102

#101

#100

#99

FORECAST: 3 SALADS AHEAD

“ You should have been there. Alice absolutely swooned at the sight of some stubble-bearded freelancer checking out business books in line at the library last week. ‘How forituitous that you’re here. What kind of books should I look at if I’m just starting out?’ she said to him. Her babble was so embarrassing, I wished I could rappel off the walls or sink into the floor and disappear. Truth to tell, since the divorce Alice seems to swoon at anything in pants.”

Yes, the mooning of a forty-something divorcee. C’est tragique. Oh, well.

The waiter stepped up to our table. I ordered my salad, then listened to sister #2, June, go on about the behavior of sister #1, Alice. As the baby, sister #3, I admired them both, but realized that June had always been the slightly imperious and well-mannered one, and Alice had always been the free and outgoing one. Alice’s “babble” probably wasn’t nearly as gauche as June seemed to think it was, but forget telling her there’s nothing to be so flabbergasted about. Even at our ages, long-buried sibling rivalries could debilitate each of us with just a single, sharp reminder of our old roles. She’d think I was taking sides.

I culled what I could of Alice’s new life from June’s conversation. No matter what June thought, the split and all its attendant life-agony was still very fresh and any flirtatious behavior was undoubtedly a cover… beneath which Alice would prefer I not try to dig. So when she finally arrived at the restaurant, fashionably late and full of her usual bubbly blonde pizzazz, I greeted her with a sympathetic smile and left it at that.

We talked about the weather.

#98

THE ENTRY HALL

My arm, draped over the doorknob. Sitting here, waiting for your return. It’ll be a few days, I guess…

The arm tingles a bit and I drop it down to my lap. Guess I’ve been sitting here a while without noticing. Guess I should shuffle off to the kitchen. Get something to eat.

When you had to ship out on short notice, I didn’t think much of it. Happens to you all the time. I drove you up to Philadelphia to listen to the loud speakers and help you race off on a red-eye flight and I came back home for a couple more hours’ sleep. You’ll be gone for a few weeks, help a new plant set up their financial system, make sure it “spins like a top,” as you always say, then you’ll pop back in. You always get bonus pay for the trips, and absence… well, it really does make the heart grow fonder. We’ve had some of the most sensual (downright amazing!) nights of our marriage in the days and weeks after you return.

Neither of us vows never to be parted again. I’m not a grey-haired mouse waiting in a corner; I like my alone time, honestly. It probably bugs you more than it does me, but you like the job.  Maybe they’ll be happy enough with your devotion that you’ll get the corner office one day. So for now, okay, it’s part of our world.

You call me every night, and text me until it’s like I’m not really alone anyway. After the sixth of the day, it’s starting to get on my nerves:

“Nova Scotia’s so buggery cold,” reads the text. “Wet, too. Think I’m getting bronchitis from all this GREYness. Wrong season to be in CAN. Get me out of here!”

“Okay, poof. You’re out. Now let me do some work, k?”

Twenty minutes later there’s a buzz on my hip again. “Everybody deserves a wknd off 1nce in a while.”

“True…”

“All ur fault. U did the poofing. I’m catching the last plane. Come get me at PHL at 6. There’s a Flyers game tonight, let’s stay in and get so busy we forget to watch it.”

“Forgot already, hurry home!!”

No buzzing for the rest of the day, then, as you head for the airport and do their dance. I can get some work done, and I’m working at breakneck speed knowing I won’t get anything else done ‘til Monday. Working at breakneck speed knowing not working, with you, will be way more fun than working at all hours.

Maybe I am a bit of a mouse after all. Look how I come alive for a tasty treat like you!

Putting on my coat at 5. Never know, the flight might be early or the traffic might be awful, so I’ll go now. I’ll stare at the skyscrapers in the city from the lounge if I’m early. Phone rings as my hand’s on the door. Number’s in Canada; what are you doing there still?

“Hey, babe. Flight delayed?”

“Mrs. Angelo, this is Officer Trilby calling.”

I’m sure Officer Trilby said more than that. Very sorry.  Black ice on the road as you headed for the airport. But I didn’t really hear her. Instead I sat down right here, one arm draped over the doorknob, and wondered why I pay Carol 25 dollars an hour if she’s not going to vacuum in the corners.

Can you believe the edges of this carpet? I can’t have people in here after the…

funeral…

with the carpet looking like this. I just

can’t

do it.

#97

WHAT’S BLACK AND WHITE AND SOON TO BE HUNG OVER?

I was uncharacteristically thirsty, for three in the afternoon, on the day you asked me if I’d like to jet out of work early for a little something at the bar down the street.

Maybe that was a mistake.

Aesthetically, the place is nothing (just like any corner pub in New York), but the beer at Joan’s place is out of this world. I don’t know if her secret is aeration or temperature or freshness or who-cares-what? She ought to franchise it, but then it wouldn’t be the same. Well, I couldn’t resist it this day. I had a couple of pints in me before we’d ordered a snack.

My napkin origami was magnificent architecture in my eyes, but it may have been a sign of not paying attention, in yours. And hey, I can’t deny it. You do tend to go on and on about the desert slopes you’ve hiked on your occasional Egyptology tours and the latest bildungsroman you’re reading. Sometimes I wish I were making squeaky, vivid balloon art to pass the time instead of discreetly (so I think) folding Joan’s cheap paper napkins.

This day, you weren’t really bothering me too much. You were yammering a bit about our boss and his incredible demands, but mostly keeping your blather brief. I was even thinking you were kind of cute. Not such a pest after all. That I’m kind of mean to hope for an ogre to jump out of the novel you’ve been reading and carry you off so I can drink my fourth beer in peace. That, in a way, after working with you so long, I’m kind of starting to like you.

And that’s how I wound up swinging by my apartment, high as a kite, picking up my two-decades-old penguin suit, and standing in a line at city hall with you by 4:15.

If only Joan had brought out the snacks sooner.

#96

SYNCOPATED RHYTHM

Syncopated rhythm
Syncopated rhythm
Syn

Jump into the band
Box your fears and stand
Jum
p

Misguided elation
Criss-crossing the nation
Stunned

No certificate to hold to
Just crowds you gave your soul to
None

On the trail of wicked, they’ll
Catch your eye for wicked
Fun

Don’t know when to stop it
Cockamamie offers
Girl in pleather proffers
Pills you shouldn’t pop It
‘s she who’s gonna profit
Three ways to take her treasure
Crash from too much pleasure
When you’re down the problem’s not hers
Num
b

Sweeping through your veins
Pharmaceutical remains
Syn

Syncopated rhythm
Can’t
keep
up
the rhythm
Done

#95

THIS IS NOT THE STORY OF A NEARLY-FORGOTTEN DOG COLLAR

The old leather collar, studded with metal hobnails, once misappropriated from my eclectic collection of wistful memories by my toddler, becomes a domineering puppet’s neckwear. He begins immediately to order the other puppets around; I’d even swear he swaggers. I watch him tear the badge off a policeman-puppet with chilling calm (knowing I’ll have to repair that later when the thrill of being destructive wears off). How does my daughter understand that dirty piece of punk nostalgia had the power to transform nerdy suburban kids into aggressive anarchists?

I’m guarded about my past, even with my new husband. I don’t ask him for details I don’t need. Why put myself in a timewarp and try to explain all the nightmares I’ve walked through, wide awake? If either of us tries to renege on our unspoken promise to let our yesterdays sleep, the trust we cling to each other with will be torn, as surely as Officer Puppet’s gold lamé badge.

Without that trust? Anarchy.

#94

#92

#91

AFTER THE PAINTERS LEAVE

The Kings of Leon in my ears, a fresh swallow of bourbon in my mouth.

Savor it, savor it.

I’d almost relinquish my badge of utter pathetic-ness tonight.

Maybe the liquor obfuscates my terrible ennui. Maybe it lends credence to it. Kind of depends where you stand…

…and right now I’m not standing. Wouldn’t be too wise, I’m thinking.

Well, thinking isn’t really the right word, either. I’m counting the mistakes the painters made when they repainted the ceiling yesterday. Enumerating all the little places where they could have preemptively used their tape to make things easy… could have put a crisp edge on the marriage

of ceiling and wall… but instead let their rollers take tiny swipes at my beautiful terra-cotta-colored bedroom.

You hated deep colors on walls, I remember with a crooked smile.

I swirl the last teaspoon of earthy lightning in my glass, and wonder how long the glow on my chest is sustainable without a reinvestment from the bottle… rooms, and rooms, away.

I’m pathetic, but not allowing myself to be sad, I mumblingly chide myself. Tottering through several rooms to get to the liquor on the sideboard is no challenge for me, newly single and free of all your doggone constraints! I can float back to the half-empty bottle now, Boy-O!

As the night began I made attempts at smiling (at the annoyingly flawed ceiling), knowing I was nowhere near as drunk as I wished I were. Bravely demonstrating that the rumors of my bottomless yearnings were entirely unsubstantiated.

I s’pose I can admit it, now. Those smiles were purely faked for the audience.

Now, we laugh together. We positively giggle. We chat, the ceiling and I. I give a wink and a nod to every Rorschach-test of a paint dribble at the very thought getting up.

How many minutes go by in not-quite contemplation? Neither of us knows.

#90

BORN TO BE WILD?

Insanely precise, I am. The epitome of studied elegance and urbane omniscience. Never met a sleek black turtleneck I couldn’t make even more iconic with the right pair of perfectly creased black jeans. Brainsick over spelling errors. Filled with tremors over pictures hung askew. Insistent upon a place for everything and everything in its…

… and then you come along. Tornados take lessons in wreaking havoc from you. Frack, I can’t even put together a decent sentence anymore. With your frequently-loathsome scent, your cagey hours destroying my ordered life, your impudent refusal to take responsibility for it all… I look out the windowpane and try to remember what life was like without you.

Or maybe I was just trying to remember if this is the week Similac is on sale at Walmart. I forget.
C’mon, baby girl, eat your mushy peas.

#89

#88

#87

#86

EVEN WITH A CRYSTAL BALL

Oh, things were bad before. But back a couple of years ago when Merlin and Medusa decided to get together, their synergized offices were able to jam out the evil spells and poisoned potions with such speed and economy (not to mention antiheroic creativity) that our particular situation got much, much worse. Some days it’s like being on the express elevator, going down—to Hades. My poor little Pegasus hasn’t been able to fly since 2005, if the little fellow was able to even then. All his fabulous energy is consumed in fear; all his spontaneous motion has been reduced to cautious tiptoeing; his fabled voice is nearly silenced, cowering in the room he visits every-other-weekend and on Thursday overnights.

If I’d had a crystal ball would I have married the warlock in the first place, Pegasus asks one night, in tears. After all, it was years of bad alchemy before the divorce, and since then, with two mentally ill witches together… sometimes it’s so much worse.

“My little horse with the broken wings, how on Zeus’ green Earth would I have gotten you if I hadn’t? (And remember, little one, Mama doesn’t like name-calling, even for Merlin and Medusa. It doesn’t really make your heart feel better.)

“No. Though I am very, very sad about the bad alchemy, and angry too, no changes. Even with a crystal ball.

“Because no magic could ever be bad enough to make me regret a single moment of you, sweet thing.”

#85

PRAYER BEFORE YOU GROW
Up!
Leap into the next adventure, while
Autumn’s air speeds your pulse
Listen to the cooing murmurs of the leaves
“Hours, minutes, precious seconds, child—
Enjoy yours while ours end”
No move you make can be a misfire now
Shoot back time; though others see you as facetious in your pursuits
It’s serious business
Let the freckles on your shoulders wink wickedly at the world
One more time. It’s not quixotic
to dive for another day of tank tops
and flip flops
While all around, scarves are scavenged
From the darkest corners of closets
And grownups knit their brows as if to guard their vapid glances against the wind.
Time enough to skulk about when the fairy dust is long gone
from your silly piggy-toes
Time enough
When you know the foolish things the grownups know.
Bedazzle them with bold giggles; make ‘em open those guarded eyes; jump up! and scream and tumble and
embrace the cold.

#84

HOW I MET YOUR MURDERER

Look, I’m not that kind of a girl.

Isn’t that how these stories all begin?

“I haven’t a violent bone in my body,” says the ingénue, batting her eyelashes a touch too nervously.

“She was such a proper lady,” says the neighbor, “No, she’d never hurt a fly.”

That’s how they all begin. Well, I’ll admit it, I have… tendencies. A panoply of tendencies that can scare people sometimes.

Like the time I wantonly beat that one to death with my shoe.

(Is that more than a mere tendency? It felt good.)

Like the time one grabbed on to the lifeline that I threw him on purpose, which I then hauled out of harm’s way with much fanfare—only to land him right in the drink where I knew there was no escape. I revved up my engine and drove away from that in a hurry, before I had time to feel guilty.

Sometimes I creep me out, because y’know, I’m not that kind of a girl.

Ah. You wanted to know how I met him.

He was a scruffy thing, not the type I’d normally associate with at all. But I was feeling my tendencies and hanging out in a bar I normally wouldn’t. A social gaffe, all right, but who was looking? Only that scruffy blond with dark eyes and dirt under his fingernails. Though I was probably past my limit, I was loose and sure of myself, and I didn’t want to go home yet. I heard him tell the bartender he was an exterminator.

“What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever killed?” I asked, leaning in as casually as I could manage while still trying to hook his eyeballs to my shirt.

“Whatever you need,” he said, “I can handle it. I’ll be the extractor of all your troubles.”

“How much… how much do you charge?” I leaned in, just a discreet couple of inches more. I knew my skin was flushed, my legs may have been slightly akimbo, and I didn’t care if he noticed. No one’s infallible, but would it be enough to tease him into what I hoped for? In my juiced state, I couldn’t prognosticate.

“For you, Miss? I think I can arrange a very… special… rate.”

Mmmm, the response of my warped dreams. For 50 bucks he’d take care of you. For 250, he’d get rid of your whole family. At last I’d be free! I was gleeful.

(I couldn’t resist asking what he’d do for me for $500… and you’d better believe it, when he told me, I almost begged him to take my 500.)

So, hey. it turns out I’m pretty small-time. Just a silly woman with an inflated self-opinion. The guilt is gnawing at me. It must be. Otherwise why am I standing over your putrid corpse and telling this tale?

I’ve discovered I’m not capable of the killing spree I’d been imagining for months.

But thank goodness, Sven is.

Stupid rat, you’ve made me doubt my beliefs; you’ve pushed me past my limits; you’ve made me question my sanity. You’ve infested more than my house, you’ve infested my soul. To the devil with all your family.

(When Sven’s not busy with his extra services… he’s working on that.)

#83

#81

#80

WEEK 1

Indefatigable snows
Rising fervor, sexy ohs
A zombie at work in the morning
Not enough sleep and it shows

Wind blows
Long walk when the trail’s froze
Double-tap on the door, darling
Foreplay begins with a midwinter rose

Love flows
Annoys others; never slows
Acrimonious glances can’t stop the feeling
When we’re dead’s time enough to doze

For now
Let’s be gross

#79

MARSHMALLOW NIGHTS

Sticky. Soft. Charred—blistered, really; black at the edges, fading to caramel’s brown.

The challenge, of course, is to lean in from the stone you’re sitting on, let your tongue catch the magical threads of sugar dripping beneath the marshmallow, and then bundle the entire thing into your mouth while it’s still hot enough to make you regret it.

(Almost.)

Summer’s given notice. A new season muscles its way in, puts its frosty touch on the tired maple trees that guard our evening castle by the pond, and no matter how long we brave the chill, we can’t seem to stay long enough around our makeshift fire.

A forgotten inner tube drifts among the autumn reeds, awash in firelight as it tries to catch a bit of our murmured conversation. We’re not tempted to jump in and save it.

Instead, we stand. Stretch like contented kittens.

And race our way back up the hill, daring time to run as fast as we.

#78

THE COURT OF UNCOMMON PLEAS

“Enter!”

There was a pregnant pause while the portly plenipotentiary examined the petitioner. A platypus could not have seemed more out-of-place among the pompous personages assembled in the portico to hear pleas.

The petite young lady, her yellow plaits perfectly smooth reflections of her usual comportment, waited placidly to approach. Her porcine keeper knew no platitude would suffice in response, once he permitted her speech, so he held off as precious minutes peeled off the clock, with a vaguely pernicious smirk about the corners of his pursed lips.

At last, the powerful, yet impermanent ruler, played his card.

“What do you want?”

“Peter, Mom said you were in charge for the afternoon, not king for the day. So give me some of those cookies or I’m telling that you had your friends over instead of doing your homework!”

Peter’s playmates looked a lot less puffed-up after Peggy popped their preposterous fantasies of preteen supremacy.

#77

ONE MAN’S TRASH IS STILL TRASH

Crawl, if that’s what it takes. Wait until midnight to bring the wrinkled junk into the basement. Steep yourself in the obsession with total disregard for the fissures that may emerge in your life.

Anything may happen when your wife finds out you’ve been dumpster-diving again, but remember the payoff as you continue your breathless hoarding—the next undiscovered Rembrandt is hiding in some suburban pensioner’s garbage!

#76

LIKE THE OLD SAYING GOES…

Do not worry about the concerns of today. The dirty house is an ephemeral concern, for tomorrow it will be a dirtier house.

Nothing is so instantaneous nor so lasting as our dislike of our current cell phone company. Except our certainty that switching will solve all our problems.

The duty of the father, tho’ it change through the years, will always be to take care of the dead rat in the cellar. Get on it, good man.

The smart man watches the news. The wise man watches the trends. The fool regards these as secondary and tertiary guides, for he is far too busy talking to people in the real world. He watches out for his friends, and his friends watch out for him.

A child is a tremendous strain on the day she is born (ow!), a tremendous pain on the day she turns two, a tremendous drain on the finances from twelve through 23, and until she’s 109, always the greatest gain you will ever know.

What is more nebulous than Friday’s paycheck? Easy to doubt its existence when so quickly it blows away.

Take heart, for the endlessly flat economy levels all; today’s conceited college grad, laughing at your beat-up Toyota in traffic, is tomorrow’s snarky McDonald’s worker.

One may never differentiate between a right-leaning Democrat and a left-leaning Republican, intensive though the efforts may be, just as one may never find a rhyme for orange.

#75

OMEN

The drive was incredibly rough.

The original plan was to make the move from Omaha to Albany in three days, but the outdated truck the rental company stuck them with didn’t make it 50 miles before the first breakdown. They spent those three days in the sleepiest of sleepy Iowa towns, calling constantly to get an estimate of when the truck would be ready to continue, before they were able to get back on the road.

This time it made it to Iowa City before smoking and sputtering to an embarrassing halt as they ascended a miniscule midwestern “hill” on the interstate. Local police stayed with them on the side of the road, lights flashing, to make sure they wouldn’t be hit by a trucker blasting by them… making all his deadlines perfectly while their own deadlines passed.

Now laid up for more repairs, they twice had to call the lawyer in New York to postpone signing the contract. Neither the man nor his wife could retain any sugar in their tone when they called to find out what would be done about this mess, which probably made no difference to the acidic-voiced customer service folks back in Omaha whose comments verged on accusing them of sabotaging their own trip. “Who on Earth would do that?” the husband screamed, at last out of patience.

Two more times, the truck would break down on its way to Albany. They arrived almost a month after they left their old home behind, full of foreboding about this move.

If there was a higher being trying to tell them to stay put, he couldn’t have telegraphed it any clearer. But the die was cast.

#74

#73

#72

#71

THE DUSTBUNNY OFFENSIVE

Dust!

The mad tendency to clean everything from top to bottom, upside-down and inside-out, only overtook our household on one occasion when I was growing up: visits from The Grandparents. There was no sleep, no rest at all, while a microscope might detect a single piece of dust or long-hidden crumb in any crevice of our little ranch. The gloom which overcame our mother as she imagined an inspection from The Grandparents was extreme, but not as extreme as the care we were to take as we finished each room, not to step in or breathe in that room again until the visit was over. We imagined that even our breath might leave a speck of dirt behind.

If anyone had asked my grandparents whether they expected such fuss they would have pooh-poohed it as completely overdone, yet when they arrived it was clear that it wasn’t done enough. My grandfather would dust the spotless television console before he could enjoy a Sunday football game, remarking in a vague apology that “glass is such a dust collector”; my grandmother would take out a dish to help make dinner, then head to the sink to scrub the perfectly clean pan for ten minutes or more, trying to remove a film that was, as we knew, only a neurotic’s mirage. Our welcome to them was to make the entire house unassailably perfect, so they could relax and enjoy the visit; their hello to us was to discover or invent its imperfections, unaware of how this crushed my mother’s spirit.

And perhaps, her desire to maintain the neat-as-a-pin abode; we wouldn’t tackle another dustbunny until the next threat of an invasion from The Grandparents.

We were alive and joyous in our slightly dusty, ever-chaotic, well-used… and gently abused… little home.

#70

ODE

In the dream your wings were like an eagle’s
Undulating beneath me as we stole
away
On the lam from offices and retail outlets and screeching traffic
From blithering idiots inhabiting their fake tans
Prattling on
b-tooth headsets affixed
about their harshly meaningless days.
I stole a surreptitious glance at you
Now a sleek cheetah, still between my legs
Waiting to pounce on your prey
Ah, that terribly public gazelle
She didn’t sense you until we’d leapt upon her larynx
The blood ran from your soft beard, over your
magnificent chest
After the kill.
The whole world won’t capitulate so easily
as one gentlelady
gently
trying to keep you moving in the right direction
toward the herd
Can’t put the kibosh on the terrible public.
Perhaps the intense communion with peace that we seek is not to be found
perhaps we can not wrap the stole of solitude around us both
except in dreams
where you are my seraphim
singing
dark, aching hosannas
And I am your ready
muse.

#69

IT DIDN’T HAPPEN THIS WAY

The candidate was instantly at ease in the office. Not a social butterfly, but as comfortable as if she’d always been there. If her disposition was any more dynamic she might have scared off her potential-future-coworkers. In the interview, her potential-future-boss seemed more anxious than she was, and that was a good thing.

“I’m no good at this,” he announced.

I’m very, very good at it, thought the woman who’d been on ten interviews a month for the last six months with no success. Sixty businesses with no use for her, she might think in an inward-facing moment of self-pity. Better to think, sixty businesses who allowed her to practice for her current interview.

“Conventional interviews aren’t as insightful for either party,” was what she said out loud, “so I’m glad you’re not too good at them.”

Mr. Potential-future-boss laughed. That had to be a good sign.

He explained where she’d be in the chain of command (right in the middle of things).

He explained that he had a life outside of work and expected other people to have a life, too. Wanted to see the people he worked with happy. (Without being coercive, this seemed to make her want to confess that at the moment she’d devote herself more than his average employee to the job, as she had no life at all. Did that sound woeful?)

“I’d love the job, Mr. Gates,” she said at last with what she hoped was an easy smile. “Just so I don’t come off as a stalker, calling every other day, about how long do you expect to leave the position open before making a decision?”

“Don’t worry, Melinda, you’ll hear from me long before the curtain comes down on 1987.”

Ms. French had a good feeling as she drove away from the Microsoft complex.

#68

GUAC-A-ROO

The kangaroo in the guacamole was really too much.

The ding-a-ling who put together the twins’ birthday party had no idea of the speed with which 7-year-olds can take apart plans that are too tightly wound. And this guy’s plans were tightly wound. Perfect for his sister-in-law’s wedding, but Joe realized now that taking referrals from a woman whose idea of loosening up would make an iceberg seem warm and fuzzy was wrong, wrong.

First one of the little monsters his kids had invited found a nail in the backyard and punctured the bouncy-house. Zzzzzzpfft. Hope at least a percentage of that was covered in the damage rider he got for the day. That damage rider was going to be stretched pretty thin.

Cake was found in the bellybutton of someone’s little brother, sleeping in a stroller by the snack table. Joe’s pleas for “our best party manners, children” went ignored… or maybe mocked. He couldn’t be sure.

The pony ride was a success, if only because the woman who took the kids around the yard was too scary-looking to mess with. Joe was wishing he was a bit more frightening, himself, when even the twins were taking digital pictures of each other’s butts on his cell phone (mercifully still in their Gap overalls… but what will teenage be like?) and sending them to horrified aunts who were wise enough not to accept the invite to the party. Now he knew why his wife had to spend a rare Saturday at the office on no notice. Too bad he was the work-at-home parent, nobody would believe he got called in.

The tent where the party games were set up, came down… courtesy of several of the little dears deciding that one game was to race up the tent poles and hang from the ropes that held the roof on. Though one kid was so filthy a vacuum couldn’t have helped after they were all trapped in the dirt under that tent, laughing and scrambling about, no one was injured.

Joe desperately wished the punch was spiked.

He headed over to the snack table, to get a glass of said punch, and discovered that the huge bowl of guacamole they’d set out for the kids’ chips earlier was missing. Who makes off with a bowl of mushy avocados?

Kids who want to see if the bowl’s big enough to fit the kangaroo’s foot do.

The poor animal, brought in for petting and intended to be watched over by Joe’s frazzled and everywhere-yet-nowhere-at-once party planner, was squelching about making green footprints on their front lawn when Joe found him, inches from the shattered bowl, with 10 four-foot tall dynamos around him planning their next moves.

Joe’s next move was to start calling parents. And his sister-in-law. And his dad.

“Nothing, Dad, I just called to talk…”

To talk about anything but the twins’ birthday party.#67

WRECKED

The agony of seeing her body double, frozen for an instant in the motion she’d practiced so many times, an oval loop in reverse around the royal blue pace car, was tremendous. The rule of the shoot was don’t watch it if you can’t handle it, but still she felt sorry when the track was blown up underneath her.

#66

RIKKA’S SONG

Daily, she was surrounded by eunuchs who clung to her for money and reflected glow, bowing to her every whim. Between those yes-men and the demands of the public, Rikka found it difficult to maintain perspective anymore.

Tough to complain, though. She was just a kid from nowhere, singing her heart out in dives and hearing the same tepid responses every night, living for free drinks and $25 prizes, when Joe Angelo found her and signed her to his label. Even Joe must have marvelled when that first single went through the roof. That was hard to recall now, when it seemed with each new release that Rikka could do no wrong. She’d been transformed into an object for her fans, who seemed to believe that every word from her was edible. The pressure was immense. In truth, it sometimes felt that they’d nearly swallowed her whole. After three years they were at the point when a mere gold record would seem lame.

Sitting in a half-empty bar between sets back in 2007, did she see it coming? No, she couldn’t have constructed a more impossible trajectory in her dreams. Wouldn’t have dared.

Now, this little sailboat Joe had bought for her was the only place she had room to think, much less to dream. Couldn’t hold more than Rikka and a friend… if she could recognize one of those through the haze. Anyway, she’d rather have the boat to herself. She loved the damp, she loved the work; she loved how out-of-sync sailing a boat to nowhere was, when she’d spent so much of her life clawing to get somewhere.

Rikka pulled in the sail for the night and grabbed a blanket to lie with on the deck. She was glad to be alone in spite of her loneliness, palpable even in the midst of the crowds that constantly surrounded her. Maybe she’d dream of erasing that pain. Maybe she’d sway on these quiet waves, let her heartbeats thump out the beat, and sing herself a lullaby about being a kid from nowhere again.

#65

LET’S OVERTHROW THE AVERAGE GUY

The lonely, neglected Little Guy
Mr. Average
Joe the Plumber
A clueless pawn in the schemes of larger men
Politicans, Tea Parties, Fox, CNN
“Let’s overthrow the Republicans,” he shouts,
“Or lean toward a radical and divide the vote.
“We’ll dance with the Dems when all else fails
“And look for the newest great hope.”
The Average Guy’s life never changes much
With the Dow, or the Congress,
The wind or the decade
For a while he swears that his kids will do better
For a while he’ll see Heaven if he suffers in silence
Fads come and they go
One thing stays the same
The Plumber’s the guy who can’t get in the game
Looking for meaning in tea party leaves
The next wave comes along and he answers the letter
You dial up the heat but he still wears a sweater
The world’s a cold place for the Average Guy.
He’s your muscle, your backbone,
He fuels your movements.
You love him, you mock him, you watch him for trends
The trends you create, he soaks up like a virus
Always believing he’s pulling the wires.
I say shake off the fog of this multi-year panic
He thinks he’s in charge and he’s making you frantic!
Put out a recall on his clueless power
Take up the torch! Now’s the hour
For the Big Guy,  Mr. C-Suite
Jack Ivy-Leaguer
We’ll send a reminder
To tell him who’s boss
We’ll take over the bottom,
let him have the top
It’s rough never knowing
What’s coming next.
Let’s grab his position—
Security’s got legs
And his unchanging life’s
As secure as it gets.
We’ll sap him of all his power to whine
Let’s overthrow the Average Guy.

#64

A MICRO-SHORT STORY IN THREE ACTS

At last the match, slow-burning in the nearly airless room, singed his fingers.

What sent him down here was such a trivial topic: an investigation of a trickle of dairy farmers in one Minnesota county who were getting approved for loans that would normally be anybody’s business but his. “Who cares? We deal in major, international crime—work that can have a volcano’s effect on world markets! Have we trimmed so much staff that I have to take over policing little-town graft, when it can’t amount to more than some poor schmuck’s payment on his Chevy?” he asked, but getting no response, he assumed that was a yes. Somebody up high thought there was something big in this two-bit skimming job.

With a sharp intake of breath and a muttered curse he dropped the spent match, and saw its dying flame ignite a speck of fluff on the storeroom floor.

For a week he and his staff had tried to find some answers, but as is so often the case, they didn’t even know the questions yet. He was more annoyed than ever when the higher-ups started calling him into meetings daily to find out how it was going. “There’s nothing here. Less than nothing. With a staff of seven I haven’t got enough to clip it together with a clothespin right now,” he told them only this morning. The big boys thought it was time for him to follow the curvy stem of this twisted vine out to Minnesota, said his boss. He thought it was time to find a job where he was digging for something more substantial than backwoods winks and nudges. But he ordered a few more files that looked interesting from downstairs (a little light plane reading), had his secretary grab him a flight to nowhere, and he called his wife to pack a bag for him for that afternoon.

When his driver was waiting out front and the papers still hadn’t shown up, he hit the elevator button for the sub-basement. As a final humiliation, he’d have to get the files himself, like some junior staffer. His ID badge opened the three secured doors to the storeroom. He brushed a gnarled hand over the light switch and it fluttered awake. Where was the Ted, the librarian he’d called down to this morning? He headed for the section on financial intelligence, when a crash near the door made him call out for Ted. The only answer was the room going black…and the air going off with a dull boom. A blackout? His ID badge wouldn’t open the door. With a box of matches he’d saved from a dinner last week, he made his way to Ted’s desk to check for a key so he could get the hell out.

The tangled bit of string and dust crackled and shone like a tiny firecracker in the instant before it ceased to exist. In the waning glow, what he found was Ted.

#63

A MICRO-SHORT STORY IN THREE ACTS

At last the match, slow-burning in the nearly airless room, singed his fingers.

What sent him down here was such a trivial topic: an investigation of a trickle of dairy farmers in one Minnesota county who were getting approved for loans that would normally be anybody’s business but his. “Who cares? We deal in major, international crime—work that can have a volcano’s effect on world markets! Have we trimmed so much staff that I have to take over policing little-town graft, when it can’t amount to more than some poor schmuck’s payment on his Chevy?” he asked, but getting no response, he assumed that was a yes. Somebody up high thought there was something big in this two-bit skimming job.

With a sharp intake of breath and a muttered curse he dropped the spent match, and saw its dying flame ignite a speck of fluff on the storeroom floor.

For a week he and his staff had tried to find some answers, but as is so often the case, they didn’t even know the questions yet. He was more annoyed than ever when the higher-ups started calling him into meetings daily to find out how it was going. “There’s nothing here. Less than nothing. With a staff of seven I haven’t got enough to clip it together with a clothespin right now,” he told them only this morning. The big boys thought it was time for him to follow the curvy stem of this twisted vine out to Minnesota, said his boss. He thought it was time to find a job where he was digging for something more substantial than backwoods winks and nudges. But he ordered a few more files that looked interesting from downstairs (a little light plane reading), had his secretary grab him a flight to nowhere, and he called his wife to pack a bag for him for that afternoon.

When his driver was waiting out front and the papers still hadn’t shown up, he hit the elevator button for the sub-basement. As a final humiliation, he’d have to get the files himself, like some junior staffer. His ID badge opened the three secured doors to the storeroom. He brushed a gnarled hand over the light switch and it fluttered awake. Where was the Ted, the librarian he’d called down to this morning? He headed for the section on financial intelligence, when a crash near the door made him call out for Ted. The only answer was the room going black…and the air going off with a dull boom. A blackout? His ID badge wouldn’t open the door. With a box of matches he’d saved from a dinner last week, he made his way to Ted’s desk to check for a key so he could get the hell out.

The tangled bit of string and dust crackled and shone like a tiny firecracker in the instant before it ceased to exist. In the waning glow, what he found was Ted.

#63

BALLET d’AUTOMNE

“It is addictive,” she whispered, watching the grand birds fly overhead. It was a crisp day, with a sharp wind occasionally blowing her thick red-brown curls in her face. Gerri and Mike had been lying still on a wool blanket, held captive by the steady flow of emigrating geese, for hours.

Mike said that their return in the spring wasn’t much to marvel at, taking place as it did over days or weeks, but on their third date he told Gerri that if she was interested, he knew a point that could get so crowded in the fall, it was almost like a border crossing. Whether their motive was to find an air current to pick up or a scent or sight that told them they were in the right place, he didn’t know, but lying in that field, he almost felt like he was a part of their escape… and a bird that was a nuisance the rest of the year became an inspiration.

“It’s today,” he said into the phone in an almost-reverent voice. “Can you be ready in fifteen minutes? I’ll pick you up.”

Gerri felt a little dopey, trying to decide how to dress for a date to watch geese in a field at 5 am—being awakened at 5 am by the telephone, she felt a little dopey anyway—but she settled on “warm and flannel” and decided that was close enough. When Mike arrived to abduct her a few minutes later, she smiled at his own sturdy-and-practical attire and realized she could have saved her concerns for something else. Trial by fire for a couple who’d only been dating a few weeks, but the birds would have to provide the beauty today.

She’d thought of absolutely nothing in advance beyond her flannel shirt and blue jeans, but Mike was experienced. When they got to the “border crossing,” she helped him unload his trunk full of blankets, a small picnic hamper, and hooray! a huge thermos of coffee. All the essential details were taken care of. They set up a breakfast and munched while watching the first few geese make their way overhead in the expected V-shapes.

Gerri was glad that at least the company was good, because the birds didn’t seem to agree that this was “the” day. When they’d been there for a half-an-hour, however, the ballet overhead began in earnest. The geese rose majestically with the sun. Mike warned that low voices would keep from spooking them, at least at first. In fact, for a bird she usually thought of as terrifically noisy their southward dance was remarkably quiet.

And crowded! Soon all trace of pattern was obliterated. In another hour the darkened sky came closer to mimicking storm clouds than geese in flight

They laid on the blanket in awe, hardly daring to disturb the magic, until some time later when Gerri’s whispered comment broke Mike’s attention.

“Being with you’s addictive, too,” he said in response.

Gerri snuggled in, her red curls close enough for Mike to breathe in their orange-and-cinnamon perfume.

#62

THIS DOG HAS FLEAS

Well inside the walkway, the silent jokers watch. It’s unthinkable to erase their wonder, yet

Weak to keep scratching my ——

Nevermind.

#61

A SHIFT IN FOCUS

Dad ran the razor over his jaw with the extreme car of a man who’s suffered the attacks of a rogue blade one too many times.

From the small desk in my room, finishing neglected homework that should have been done the night over the weekend, I could hear the blade swishing in the sink right through my wall, hear Dad fumble in the medicine chest for an aspirin, and hear Mother’s soft voice as she sat on the window ledge and tried to get a straight answer out of him.

“Your boss said we’d be fools to stay, last week at his barbecue. He thinks the shift in focus is going to take down your whole division, David.”

“What does Fred know,” Dad retorted with a half-listening grumble. “Every threat to the company is an onslaught to the whole industry in his eyes. Remember when he thought that recording devices would end us all? No such thing. People still need us for all the same reasons. I think the guy’s great and I’ll eat his burgers and steaks whenever Sunny asks us over, but Fred’s too squeamish to be leading a division, if you ask me.”

“Even Sunny is ready to get out. She says while their family’s still young and nimble enough to leave without disrupting much, she wants him to look someplace else. Doesn’t care if he has to take a cut in pay,” Mother responded in her gently insistent way.

You could almost hear Dad straightening himself up to full head-of-the-household stature as he dried his razor and replaced it in its cup. “Maybe that’s what they need to do. Fred’s wired too tightly. Ought to put me in line for his job, too.”

The matter, I could tell, was officially closed.

It wasn’t fancy, but it was a life, Dad liked to say in those days. When he took over Fred’s job he was proud enough to bust the buttons on his plaid three-piece suit. Mother may have worried, but she kept it to herself. We had a wonderful time for a year-and-a-half, and Dad was right—the company didn’t shift its focus, and the division didn’t go down.

Instead, Brooklyn Independent Typewriters went under. The bank locked the doors to the factory one day, and Dad was calling Fred, asking if he ever found work out in Michigan.

Nobody asked my opinion, of course… but Flint looked like a fine place to finish out my high school years.

#60

THE END

From the word bloodshed, I knew this Challenge was going to be the toughest. The harder Shane pushes in one direction, the more I scream for a way around his “random” word generation—but now Jamie seemed to leave me no choice! I might have expected it. Where could I take this group, that it wasn’t already leading me? Adrenaline raced through my veins, imagining the horror themes I might invent. Carefully I peered into the heart of my darkness, knowing that I’ve lived more ominous plots than I care to pen. I do let some creepy inner workings out in this creative space, but following the Challenge’s carefully-crafted path this time seemed too easy.

Or was I really hiding a paranoia, that I’ll be found out as a mere hack? Does this intense silence howl that I’m not up to it?

I steeled myself for the attempt.

Breathe, if somewhat shallowly, and begin…

Or end.

#59

JACKHAMMER

Automated pain responses
Even though I’m thrilled you’re gone this
Body acts as though it wants you
Loathe the men that I am drawn to
Ahhhrr, jackhammer

Whisky’s smooth but nothing soothes me
Can’t be hard when sex is easy
Drop your name out of my speed dial
it’s a game deleting you while
Old jackhammer
keeps coming on

And I won’t need you when I fall
You won’t ever get a call
Ripped and bleeding red and raw
I can take it on the jaw
I’m not looking in this bar
For a gently shining star
‘Cuz I’m the spark you never saw…

Jackhammer

Combination rugged hero
Backstreet legend, heartless zero
Where’d they put the warning label?
Scream to the ladies, now I’m able
Jackhammer

Would it cut you down to size
To open other virgins’ eyes?
Or have you found tomorrow’s prize already?

Master narrow twists and turns
Rid myself of all my burns,
but deep inside me a traitor yearns

I’m strong but I’m no mem’ry shredder
F–k I just can’t make it better
Jack

Jackhammer
Pain rips through my core

Jackhammer
It’s drilling me

#58

ADVERT 3

“It’s astronomical, the difference it’s made to chest and my abs,” Greg told me at lunch the other day.

I took another bite of my Asian-beef-salad, but I admit I felt a little guilty about it while Greg’s talking about getting fit. Maybe I should have skipped the beef.

“I’ve gained an inch on my chest, and lost two on my waist,” he said. “Last year when I went to my 20th reunion, getting into my old jeans was like wrestling an elephant. I didn’t realize how fat and lazy I’d gotten, always wearing a suit that the tailor never tells me is getting larger and larger. Trying to get into a pair of jeans that hasn’t come out of the drawer for years was… depressing.”

I shoved the beef to the side and tried to distract myself from the rest of the plate by leaning in to the conversation more. These restaurants always serve you too much.

But I noticed Greg was tucking into a half-pound burger like it was a diet-rice cake—no worries at all! I couldn’t help but ask if he was worried it would all come back.

“That’s what used to happen to me,” he went on. “I’d hear about some new fad diet, eat nothing but pistachios and kiwi fruit until my larynx went into spasms at the very thought; lose 15 pounds, and then tremble as I waited to see if all fifteen would come back or if I’d regain twenty! Diets were my personal portal to Hell, Sam, I’m telling you. Even my doctor was worried about me.

“Now I don’t even look at the scale. The weight’s off for good and I know it because of how things fit and how I feel. The guys on the softball league at work are complaining I make them look bad in front of their wives now!”

If this sounds like magic to you, I’m here to assure you it isn’t. Greg worked hard to get those measurements back to where they were when he was 20 years younger. The Abalyzer may have saved his life, but only because he got up and took control. No guarantees, capiche? Anyway, you wouldn’t believe me if I gave you one.

The Abalyzer is only as good as the man who uses it. I guess that’s sort of a guarantee.

I almost forgot! You’re probably wondering how it ended…

Let me tell you. Between the smell of Greg’s hamburger and the sight of my own paunch, thankfully hidden by the restaurant’s tablecloth, I decided to give it a try.

I’m a CEO at the top of my game, with a wife and kids who want to see me now and then. I confess I can’t make as much time for it as single, freewheeling Greg can. But I thought it was worth trying for 15 minutes, a few times a week. Even I can find 15 minutes!

Well, you know what I looked like before. I looked like a side of Asian beef myself. Maybe not even the flattering side. When you see this picture, you’ll know how good this machine really is.

It’s not fair to call it a machine. A few weeks later I told Greg that for me, it’s more like a fitness tool. It’s given me some of my old swagger. I’m getting back in form, and I’m willing to say that this man, at least, is as good as the Abalyzer.

Ow! Pen down. Elise adjusted the pillow behind her back. Sitting in one spot so long made her think the Abalyzer ought to come and fix her aches and pains… and that paunch, too. Yeesh. She scratched the dog, lazing next to her on the sofa, and made her notes to Rob in the margins:

“Rob: Remember to put the ‘before’ picture of the CEO at the top. Shirtless, bad lighting, something that looks like he took it in his basement. Flabby of course. Keep the photo that goes after ‘When you see this picture’ relatable: nothing fantastic, just make him look 8 or 10 years younger! Ha, ha. Maybe it should look like it’s on letterhead? Might be a nice touch. Let me know what you think.”

Elise stood up, shuffled over to the scanner, and set the sketches and scribbles down on it so she could get the rough out of her hands as soon as possible.

“All over the world, men are waiting for this ‘astronomical’ tool, my doggy, my dear. Can’t make them wait a minute more than is absolutely, positively necessary, eh?”

Max yawned and stretched in response.

“You don’t fool me, old thing. Poodle-yoga won’t work near as well as an itty-bitty Abalyzer. Maybe Rob can get you one. He owes me, for sure.”

Email. Attach scan. Send.

“What’s next, Max?”

A cocked ear and maybe a raised doggy-eyebrow was all she’d get out of her sleepy pal for now.

#57

POLE POSITION

It’s a cliché Friday afternoon, made for a picture postcard. The last weekend of summer, and you can smell a hint of autumn approaching. The skies are blue, the air is fresh and cool, and I got all my work done in record time. Two o’clock and the last paperwork is complete, the last signatures are on letters that need to go out, and any other stuff can wait. I even told my receptionist to go home. This office is closed ‘til Monday, baby.

My hair goes into a ponytail and the jacket comes off. I hop in the car and put the top down—I am ready to disappear. I’ll drift down the coast and stop when I’m tired. Don’t even try to rescue me. Who cares how I lost I get on a day like this?

A couple of stops first for supplies. Wine. Suntan lotion. Is one bottle enough? Of the wine, I mean. Well, I’ll get more when I’m settled someplace.

Hit the highway and crank Van Halen so I’m annoying the world. “Summer nights and my radio…” A guy on a motorcycle leans over in a slowdown outside the city and gives me the thumbs-up. Guess I’m not annoying him.

I laugh. Yeah. Thumbs-up all the way. That’s right.

Then the song’s over, and I haven’t gone a mile. Who cares? I’m in no rush. Those stunning Jersey shores will wait for me.

Guy in front of me has canoes on his truck.

Hard enough to see where I’m going without stupid boats in my view.

I’ll just touch the gas and run around him. No problem.

What time is it? I left work an hour ago. This accident should have cleared up by now. Why am I still closer to work than to my peaceful weekend?

Van Halen. Bon Jovi. Jason Mraz sounds a little too happy for me, so he gets ejected. Not now, buddy. Catch up with you later.

This is no accident jam. This is shore traffic like I’ve never seen it.

By five o’clock I realize I’m gonna run out of CDs.

By five-fifteen, 62,000 more of my closest friends, just out of work, have joined me on this highway to nowhere. I put the top up an hour ago. Can’t stand the exhaust fumes. Keep taking this little car and looking for the best lane.

Signal—barely, so they don’t have time to decide to close the gap.

Crush the gas—just for a second.

Jam on the brake—no hitting that looming bumper…

And do it again.

We creep along a bare inch at a time. Everybody knows they could walk it faster. The afternoon heat’s excruciating now, with the sun screeching in to compete with my tiny engine’s useless a/c. Car’s not built for wimpy air-conditioner-lovers, man!

I haven’t run out of tunes. Head’s pounding too bad to keep listening.

At eight-thirty I’m almost there. Almost at the begining of my plan to drift along the shore. You could say the traffic has eased, but I wouldn’t. Eyeing the bottle from the liquor store, wondering how anyone could possibly care if I had a swig of wine when we’ve only increased our speed to 15 miles per hour.

The motel’s billboard shouts at me: “Rest now. Play tomorrow. Only fifteen miles from the beach!”

I jockey for pole position one more time, to get from the fast lane to the exit before this Shangri-la escapes me.

Fuck the beach and my hobo-hippie plans. I haven’t got the strength to go on.

“Is there a liquor store nearby?”

#56

WE ALL WANT A LOVE PARADE

I groaned softly, and Laurie backed away, the width of a whisper, to give me a giggle and a winking scold. “Shh! Someone’ll hear you,” she said wickedly.

I moved in closer to brush my lips on hers as I protested. Her breath came into my mouth in labored torrents as I spoke.

“You smash your mouth against me here in the middle of the city, for the whole world to see, until you’re sure I can’t possibly keep walking…”

“I wasn’t sure,” she interrupted.

“Well, I think if you move away from the front of my jeans I’ll prove it to the world.

“So don’t move away from the front of my jeans…

“Please.” The last word came out as another groan. I was melting into her eyes, forgetting what I was trying to say, wanting nothing more than her lips again, no matter who might see it.

Before I met her I thought I was a big shot, immune to every come-on (since they’d all been tried on me). This woman—she wanted me with every inch of her skin, I could sense it—yet coolly, she waited for me to come on. I could write a novel about the conflict that coursed through my veins in the two weeks I took to decide, imagining her all over me like a warm rain, but unwilling to take the risk. She ripped a hole in my being with her deep grey eyes in those two weeks, and still I was never certain that it wasn’t my overactive imagination.

I’d never felt lonely before.

Is it so unusual to say that I’d never felt lonely before? Now all I wanted was for her to mend this hole in me.

I hope I didn’t beg when I finally made my move.

Actually, I don’t care if I did.

She’s a force to be reckoned with. We’ve been making up for my two weeks of my blustering hesitation for seven years now. We are those sickening people you see, parading their love. The ones who never let up. I can’t stand them.

And I hope I never stop being one of them.

(You should try it.)

#55

GROOVE-BACK JUICE

Time’s run out on “Us” once again

Maybe I’m no good at “Us.”

I have a morbid fascination with dissecting these romances when they fail

and they always do,

fail.

No note of anger

not even hurt in my voice, this time—we

can have the conversation for as long as you like.

You’ll see no tears.

There’s been a wonderful discovery ‘round here. I’m

trying to figure out how to use it best.

There could be serious money to be made in bottling this sauce,

even if it’s only to show other ladies how to suck it up and move on.

I’m an old pro with a new attitude. Copy my ways and set yourself FREE!

Or maybe

it

won’t help much ‘cept right now.

But it works for ME.

This sugary, honeysuckle, warms-me-up juice?

Mix lush, fat undertones of recently-unearthed self-love

with the recognition

that you’re a loser.

#54

THE MANICURE

On Fridays, she cuts his nails.

Eric always gives her the same blank expression in answer to her rough paws on his baby-soft hands. This used to be a sore spot and a relief all at once; Georgie had longed for him to swat at her and tell her to get away with her brutish thick fingers, but she’d always shrunk at his unthinking criticisms, too. She’s used to the impassive face now, and those times have passed.

She explains that she’s late because the traffic on 91 was murder today. Friday afternoon, what did she expect? Everybody’s dying to get out.

She wonders why people choose the jobs they do, if their desire to get away from them is so great that they all have to explode out of their offices en masse on Fridays. Everydays, really, she smiles. I don’t get it. Where’s your nail file? I cut this one a bit rough.

I’ll never be like that. They’ll have to tear me from my desk when I’m old. I only rush when I’m on my way there.

Or on my way here, of course.

A figure in white passes by his door, hesitates—considering coming in, maybe—then eases away. Eric ignores her, but Georgie can’t resist a mention. Pretty, that one. Lucky to have her to fuss over you, Eric.

This Friday, maybe Eric smiles a little. Georgie’s always taking every random movement apart, looking a brief flash of his former smile. Longing for his little abuses, and his old rakish grin. Nothing changes. For all the years they were together… all the years she was with him, but he was never truly with her… she was always eager for abuses and grins. That’s how it goes.

“My girlfriend,” he’d say by way of introduction, “or so she believes.” Pulling her in and pushing her away. He needed her. He needed her to need him, until the day when his life was shattered along with his twin-engine plane, over Nantucket Sound. No rhyme, no reason, just a little part that had a rough edge and one day that edge got stuck. When he woke up…

Well, he didn’t.

But those figures in white can perform some amazing feats with their machinery, if they fish you out of the water soon enough, so here, with his brown eyes concealed by eyelids that rarely flutter, lies Eric, baby-soft and completely helpless.

This Friday, like one hundred and thirteen other Fridays since that crash, he doesn’t need her at all.

Every day, she’s there.

On Fridays, she cuts his nails. In case he wakes up.

#53

JUST LET IT BLEED, ALREADY

Who will be there, when I’m old?
What will I do
Where will I lie
When I’m tortured, will you hear me cry?

Why all the roadblocks to happiness?
How can I put myself
There on the greens, in
their photograph of my happy-ending scene?

Who’s listening now, to my heart as it bleeds?

Whose ears are sick of my intimate needs?

#52

#51

#50

#49

#48

POST-MODERNISM

11:30.

Yesterday’s “champagne” tasted sour as she took a swig from the lipstick-stained glass left on the fireplace mantel. Petal Pink, she noted—the lipstick, not the flat California fakery.

It tasted less sour from the second glass she found, stashed next to the ashtray in the basement studio, and not bad at all from the third. In spite of the hangover, she thought she might never quench her thirst; but the stench from the jade bowl of crushed stubs seized her, and Diane fled upstairs to clear her head.

3:15, another blistering-hot afternoon.

Thank goodness for Molly; by the time Diane’s eyelids, still streaked from the previous night’s maquillage, fluttered again, the remainder of the party had disappeared. “I wish you were here full-time,” she tried to call to Molly, but Diane was still half-awake and two-thirds hung over, and no words came out.

She drifted off for a few extra minutes’ rest, remembering back to when her husband’s popularity made full-time help to run the house a necessity. Parties every weekend that lasted ‘til dawn, to gain the favor of loathsome critics and desperately chic collectors for his latest gallery show; intense periods of work that could last for weeks; letters to answer, requests to deny, lovely large cheques to deposit… to pay their lovely large bills. No woman could be expected to do that alone and ever keep up her own engagements.

8:45; crickets serenading too damned loudly.

No engagements now. That part was easier.

How did she sleep the entire day away? Molly had gone, but a small plate sat covered in the dining room for a grateful Diane to discover. With her bird-like frame it didn’t take much to keep her going another day. That was about all she hoped for—to overcome one more night’s emptiness.

After dinner, she filled her highball with the first three-fingers of whisky and went down to the studio, with a vague hope of finding him working there. She fingered a frame he was readying for one of the larger pieces, before nestling into a sofa next to the scrupulously-clean jade ashtray. The show next month was his first in four years and he had so much to finish. His overblown reputation, now musty and crumbling, to live up to. One small fête in absurd homage to their old lifestyle wouldn’t recover the magic when his talent was shot, and time had conspired to make his work seem quaint. Only a revival of his withered drive to succeed could do that.

Diane didn’t see him often enough to tell him any of this, of course. The ice cubes rattled unhappily in her empty glass as she contemplated the unfinished works, leaning against the walls in tough-guy stances, mocking the genius her husband once was.

She crossed her thin arms defiantly, nearly dropping her glass with the rough gesture, and glowered back at the canvases. You won’t defeat us, she tried to tell them, but they weren’t buying it.

Diane could only hope that Petal Pink was smart enough to send him home once in a while.