A Party (Musing)

Sometimes the feeling will return to me, not truly though, not fully. It settles like a craving and appears like a bird overhead, a sudden gift come from where, headed for there. Only I wish that it would let me pet it or feel its soft feathered belly nestle into my cupped palms and its warm heart’s spirited tapping at my now enormous hands. But these are all I wishes I know, ones that make me wish I could still believe in wishes. Then I’d have a new one, for reincarnation, to live again in the fresh awakening of the world at 19 and 20, when I couldn’t bear the awkwardness of myself, not realizing that free to feel so apart from things was the most irreplaceable awesomeness. This must be how the rich feel, the very rich, who will never have to worry about saving for retirement, like children still, and always. As though they could lay their blanket down just about anywhere a little kinder than cool and have a picnic, a party with jokes and treats, like children. I used to picnic in all my waking hours; I didn’t even know that I was at a party.

Bug me (A Prose Piece)

I tried listening to the Beatles because I thought they could change my life. All I’d ever heard, in lieu of an actual album, were people raving about this music that could do something to you. Music in a world where only other people could do something to you. Music that could change your life. Music that would make you a fan; a believer; a follower; a devotee; a preacher; a lover of beetles.

I stripped naked every morning after I got dressed and went to work. I served old women hot tea with my plump jiggling breasts bumping against the saucers. I looked strangers in the eye waiting in the cold at bus stops and offered them rides. I let everyone look at me completely naked and totally unshaped like a model through the frosty shield of my grey on the outside and grey on the inside car.

My CD player broke years ago and I never tried to get it fixed. I started listening to radio stations with other people. I started keeping the music alive that was the synthetic nightmare chasing children down the hallways and scaring them into being cool, self-righteous, apathetic, licorice-tongued teen-agers who see me and everyone else over twenty-five as sexless, money hungry, youth deprived, washed up members of the adult militia.

I ate every last crumb from the corners inside the cobwebs of my kitchen. Then I let the baby spiders crawl all over my body; pinching me; biting me; infecting me with racism, hate, blood-thirst, and a reptilian vengence I’d feared was the devil my whole childhood and one day became the creased skinned woman I saw in the mirror. I took bubble baths with Jacuzzi jets with all of my detractors and hummed a tune for their story sewing. I ate live snails; I bit into them whole and crunched down on the shells until my gums split, my jaw ached, and I could feel her babies wiggling down my throat believing they were coming to life for the first time. Little did they know of the pit of acid; their imminent demise.

I picked flowers from the hands of children and carved my name into a thousand trees. Their wounds spouted blood each time, but I went on, knife in raw hand, in search of a syrup filled trunk. Carrying my paper plate full of pancakes I’d left behind for wolves or squirrels or lonely souls lost in the forest. I looked down and saw that my plate was empty and held tight, because the illusion was heavier than the soft, white and orange discus of dough mounted by siblings and cousins.

I stood at the edge of my mother’s grave and dropped M&M’s and pennies into the full plot because the only dirt around was my whole body and I couldn’t bear to throw myself on top of her like that. I couldn’t bear to make a mockery of her life like that. So, instead, I offered her departed soul candy and money, the only things that had ever interested me in this life. Even in all of my ignominious stupidity I could still smell the smoke coming from the neighbors chimney at night and I could hear the words that sweetness uttered. Love and bliss and treasures like that weren’t of this earth. If you just read the lyrics, there wasn’t anything that special about a Beatles song. It was just something in the music, I suppose, something people needed so badly they collectively decided could exist there wherever the Beatles took their guitars. Instead of in a church or in their grandparents’ backyard. Somewhere better, somewhere for everyone. Somewhere in the music.

Sad Seamstress (A Short Short Story)

I don’t go to that place anymore.  But that doesn’t mean the red phone, the old chair, the hairs aren’t still growing there. Glowing. And ringing.  Waiting for me to be sitting.  Swinging.  And tempting my braiding hands.

Take me.  Take me she says, like a whisper.  Like a dirty rope I need to climb.

I was a mop without the stick lying on that corner.  Crying, like a mad woman.  He spun the car back, his headlights into my eyes, and parked—haphazardly.  Shattered and quivering, he pulled me up, led me into our apartment.  I still don’t know.  It was me or that city.  Or he and I as just one shape why my heart raced my brain to blindness.   To just pain.  The sky wasn’t even so dark yet.

Just didn’t know—then—that I didn’t have to collapse.  Beginning at the center, into reality until I raised the very hairs.  Giving out what it’s like to give up. 

But it is bearable.  Anything is.  Except for silence. 

Lies, like nails working into me.  Splitting biceps, puncturing buttocks, birthing into my back.  

You can’t just give half, or part, or some—or I can’t. 

Cries of a sad seamstress weaving raw weeds with steely strands.

He should have choked me, I thought.  So many times.

 

 

Funny Disguise (A Short Story)

I could have found myself at the bottom of a pile of dead, wreaking of rotting cunt,disassembling bodies and retained the arousal to find my lover’s cock somewhere on the other side of fifteen hundred pounds of anonymous human mildew. I wondered what a cop might say if he pulled me over; my fluorescent wig, my trench coat, my sopping, sheer panties, my clank-ety metal belt, my open container of caffeine and the barking scent of coffee on my breath. That cop might have thought I was a hooker I told my boyfriend after we’d attempted to make use of my surprising apparel.

I can’t remember how it all seemed to register with him when he opened the door to his apartment building and saw me standing there in high heels, a false bubble gum bob, sun-glasses, and khaki jacket with the cloth belt knotted tightly around my waist, like some vixen with mediocre gun handling skills in a Sci Fi flick. I might have wanted him to fuck me wildly, to look up from my tanned, toned, flesh where flesh should be, breasts bulging over my push up bra, from inside the synthetic wings of my purple wig and register for myself the pleasure of being a live action Playboy model for the sole audience, an older man, my lover. I suspect what I wanted was to live out a fantasy that dropped and hunkered down inside my stomach like an anchor when I first began seeing flashes of sex and mis-communicated truths via sexual advances, suggestions, and lingering jazzy notes with pronounced lingering quality revealed from the TV in my parents’ house when my mother forgot to change the channel to something more appropriate and I became very curious about this pleasure box; this house for feelings and ideas we didn’t discuss or witness on my block; a world out there, but in there; a taboo voodoo land of everything I never saw at home and had my mouth washed out with soap for mentioning.

Someone watching this night inside of a TV would think that I was in the mood for sex. But I wasn’t, I was in the mood for TV. I was in the mood to see who would win for his admiring, inspired, salacious, fuck-hungry stare: Me or the TV. I had stories and long thigh bones, advertisements for things nobody needs, laugh tracks to simulate different types of audiences, religious programming, talking animals, and remote control. Once he’d locked the door and returned to his shaded dent on the couch cover he hesitated to resume viewing the TV. It remained on as I paced slowly back and forth between him and the pleasure box, while his eyes zigzagged to capture me and the glowing images, how a football receiver dodges tackles while racing towards the end zone. As I draped my trench coat across the couch I felt I had him, nothing could compete with this amount of young human flesh, except hate. Eventually, I tired of prowling at the edge of my tiny cage, waiting for him to rise and unlock the gate and release me from this chest puffing saunter. It wasn’t the feeding hour. I had no intention to lazily gnaw at a torso sized hunk of red meat. I wanted out, to kill, to hunt, to choose my prey at least.

He asked me into the bedroom after I’d already taken my wig off and stood scratching my itching head while studying my body in his bathroom mirror. He wanted me to put the wig back on. I crouched beside the bed at his request and sucked on his penis for a moment. The wig had become irritatingly itchy, painful. I don’t even remember if we fucked after that, but I can remember the sound of the TV in the other room and the people inside of it laughing.

The Beginning of a Long Distance (Incomplete Musings)

I walked into that corridor counting the hairs on his head. “Four-thousand-seventy-seven, Four-thousand-seventy-eight, Four-thousand-seventy-nine—Where is he?—Who am I now?—What could this be if—if?—if?—if?” The airport waiting lounge, with its baggage claim conveyers—slithering slowly then stopping, ruckus-ing, then releasing, returning what a life was to its pretender—appearing behind electronic banners for airlines and dotting off in either direction, boasted a height capable of containing an entire airplane standing on its tippy toes, nose to the ceiling. That chivalrous space, cascading panes—blue sky swarming at their backsides—like great puddles, gave way to a breakage in the eternity of separation by objects, bore a sanctuary to mimic the seemingly too grand and limitless core of a human existing while collapsing into a particle of dust that awakened in my deepest heart. And it began to itch.

There were men everywhere. Clusters of soon to be grandfathers in undone collars and worn, gold bands away on business leading their unwise, proud chest-ed, toothy rumble of tanned, still thick haired incarnations sporting fashionable pink ties, concealing beer breath and condom lined wallets that would be torn open and wedged quickly inside a girl who would mistake a one night stand for a marriage proposal, grunged ramblers with the militant pursuit of mission directed towards their not ceasing, not attaching longer than to learn a girl’s name and departing the moment it seems possible to guess at its meaning [an action such as this might cause the yin to turn back on the yang (And what if there was no yin to counter? Or not enough? Or not what the yin would have you believe its consistency really felt like? Or not what the yin itself would have decided was so yin about it?), and one kind-eyed, dark skinned dreamer full of filthy romanticism, pushing a mop on wheels, and mindlessly humming a tune.

I protested the natural inclination to look in their eyes. Somehow I knew I couldn’t bear or casually process any extraneous human contact, even in the form of a pupil kiss divided by thirty feet and sealed with total anonymity. It occurred to me on an unconscious level that such an arbitrary connection might cause my kettle to steam and I’d go rushing out of the airport, denying my visitor the opportunity to witness my timeliness and respectful anticipation for his arrival. From the moment I gently rested my bum and back against the soft faux grey leather of the socialist seat wedded to a row of four beside and five behind that faced the other direction, the itch cropped up, like a caterpillar existing at the bottom of a great dark cavern by the pure spontaneity of someone having imagined it being there. I couldn’t at first put my finger on the itch, not only because it had been so long since I’d felt something like it, but because I had not summoned it, or even summoned summoning it, and yet, there it was, bug eyed, many legged, and irritatingly real. And only because, for me, it suddenly was.

He dropped into sight like a boy I dreamt about from a magazine; someone quick, accidentally handsome enough, purposeful, and un-purposefully odd. I bulked at the possibility that this character rambling curiously below airline markers made unidentifiable by the distance between the pilot and a flight attendant fastened in for landing at the back of the plane was my guest. My tickled itching heart sprouted vine-ish tentacles, sent searching with such carnal, timeless marrow so true as to feel charmed by the bright air of the afternoon, by the calendar date in June, by the ray of sun and chemical reaction that sends a bud splitting open into a radiant splash of life. I clasped my phone and continued a call with a friend about borrowing his bicycle perhaps for my guest while the boy tore off from the luggage advertisement and charged into my better view until he was standing over me swarmed by my willful vines. I cased my lungs in tin foil, impromptu perfected a coy expression for cover, and merged into solidarity with the grey socialist seat, desperately floundering, rooting through my stored supplies of emergency rationale to de-claw the lover in me and forbid me from treating my guest a human scratching post laced with catnip.

His dark eyes sparkled like the surface of a lake at night—one that’s pulled the luminescent moon to many small pieces, relishing each bit of perfection—and lured me through the trees to gaze upon his hidden, un-named shape trapped on an unknown stretch far from the gas stations, banks, and sandwich shops. This bird that had once fallen, as an egg—as had I—from the very nest upon our symmetrical shelled release into this forest, drew out his wings, and I resounded in feather-same fashion to give and bear the span and character of my tool-ish toys. I was naked woman dismissing the safe guard and garb of the spindly woodlands her rounded form offset, cooling herself, diving into the embrace of a black pool hairy with shards of heaven. I was an adult animal (or perhaps a toddler capturing for the first time her own reflection) glancing the form of its species armored with cock rather than clitoris, with corner rather than curve. I surfaced and withdrew from the safe manufactured seats and dove my arms about his neck, my breasts puffing and gathering warmth into his chest, my hands clasping his shoulder blades, as my chin led soaring lips into his swooping mouth. And in this embrace a dance began, one long ago choreographed by distant, un-named lights.

Whatever goodness had been trapped in me by the accident of my own existence, time, and the dice roll of good breeding fled into his warm, vaporous mouth—that still tasted of milk as it had years ago, cupped around several loose particles of sweet curiosity and swam back into my breath, flooding my taste buds with a familiar reminder. A door you always forget to shut completely, that looks closed, but isn’t ever. His hands were searching my back and hips and arms and shoulders for a place to land or checking for the heart beat which can be found at any inch of the body or continuing on in effort to resist the squeezing of flesh without permission. We hadn’t meant to say the words that had always been obvious and therefore easy to say, and because of this lacking in drama we were inclined to remind ourselves and one another over and over again a thousand times a day in case the other hadn’t heard since we chose to speak these highly confidential words in a whisper. I love you. I love you too. Oh I love you too. I love you too darling. So forth and onwards forever and for always. Perhaps only birds of a feather know each other are dying for the reassurance one desires and how to affirm for another one's devotion.

The Hungry (A Short Story)

I closed the window and there over the picture of a mountain range was a photograph of an emaciated African girl. The Pop Up read, “Have you fed anyone lately? YOU CAN SAVE THE HUNGRY! Click HERE to find out how!” A representative from the Special Olympics had called our house asking for a donation and just last week my husband and I put a check in the mail for twenty-five dollars; I never liked doing the payments over the phone. I felt very sorry for any starving child, but my instinct told me that the little girl in that photo was dead already because the picture had been taken fifteen years ago (at least!). Then I hated the makers of that Pop Up a little, because I all I’d done since 9:30 was imagine different ways of being killed in common circumstances. Getting hit by a gorgeous modell and flipped into the air on my lunch break. An elevator cable snaps; crunch. The entire building catches on fire and I’d choke on the fumes like everyone else.

I started to feel bad about not appreciating my life. I put an away message up on instant messenger and headed for the restroom. The two other offices on our floor were full of women. Consequently, the ladies room rarely provided the kind of sanctuary some of us need and expect. Typically, the space was bustling with whispers and laughter and a twenty-year old smoking a menthol cigarette in the handicapped stall. I peeked in and a stale gust of cigarette stench snuck out. I kept going, rounded the corner, and exited into the stairwell.

Thankfully, there were only three women working on the entire 11th floor. I slipped out of the stairwell and sped like a dart down the empty hall. I unlocked the knob with my key. The ladies room greeted me with a safe odorless silence. I closed the stall door, pulled a sanitary square of tissue paper from the dispenser, and placed it on the seat. I sat and dragged my panties to my calves, closed my eyes, and felt my palms burry into my sockets. I exhaled and my skirt cinched around my waist. A wave of pain twisted through my abdominals; I arched to make it stop. My chest began to rattle like a lawnmower. I let out a whimper and a river of hot pee shot into the toilet.

I stayed there and cried for five minutes. I released control of my mind and it steered my heart through a lifetime’s encyclopedia of hurts. My 3rd grade teacher singling me out, a bully on the bus sneering at me, a woman behind the make-up counter tisk-tisking at my complexion, the blissful mother in the Hamburger Helper commercial, my ex boyfriend dropping me off three blocks from my apartment and rolling down the window to say he’d been cheating on me, my husband waiting at home in front of the TV, my three beautiful nieces and my perfect sister, the little African girl crying on a rock, a group of elated retarded children breaking the ribbon at the end of a run, the pretty young receptionist chatting with my boss, and the stack of To Do lists pushed inside my purse.
One of my gal pals in the office popped me up on AIM when I got back.

Everything OK?

Sure, everything’s fine.

Good :)

But nobody really cared. I figured that out. I’d caught my husband on the kitchen phone comparing notes with his mother. If I talked to a co-worker my sad life would be the topic of discussions on lunch break or at happy hour and then again at home with their spouses, roommates, or significant others. I read a poem in high school about how people have to suffer alone. What bothered me about my suffering was that it wasn’t over anything abnormal; I just always felt a little sad. Sure, at times I could forget it, like at birthday parties or admiring jewelry in the mall. Or on Holidays or when the choir harmonized at church, or when Rachel Ray took another bite of one of her savory appetizers without gaining even an ounce. It was the kind of thing nobody talked about. The little African girl was still staring at me. I closed the IM from my gal pal and clicked on her sad little face. The hourglass came up and after a second a webpage with naked girls inserting giant cocks into their mouths took over my screen. I hit the close button before anyone saw it.

The Gofer (A Short Story)

I’m not going back to Los Angeles. Not today, not tomorrow, not any time soon.

I dreamt I was back stage at the Oscars. A friend of mine, an actress living in New York with her tea total boyfriend, was working on a production up for awards and I was there care of her invitation.

The dream ended with close ups of a young woman like myself, riding on the back of a horse, the sexy rugged feminine type I aspire to be. The narrator described the progression of her hair color over the years, from plain brown to super mega ultra red.

Close ups of Nicole Kidman decked out in a pink crepe sheer chiffon, a sweep of webbed pink lace across her face. Boiling eyes, coming down the stage that felt more like a runway. Some electric blue look of knowing. Looking right at me, as though into my eyes. But this seemed strange as I was all around her. I was the dream weaver. Her look, right down to the pupils pointing back at me, was my total creation.

There was a close-up of her hips and crotch moving around inside the dark pink gown, the legs crossing back and forth like gears in a machine, the hips pointing and thrashing like corresponding parts.

Everyone behind stage was running around in the dark. I was to retrieve a woman from the waiting lounge (wherever that was). A young, plump blonde pushed a clip board into my hands and dragged me through a maze of stairs and levels with different lighting fixtures and different sized crowds. Then she pushed me onto an escalator. Between my thoughts I heard her, “Go find the ticket holder.”

As the escalator caused me to rise I realized its design was rather unique. First of all, the further up I we went the less railing there was to hold onto, which scared me. Also, we kept going higher, and, in the initial portion of the ride, looking up, I could not see exactly where this moving step under my feet was leading me. And once we passed so many floors, the railing having disappeared altogether, terrorized, I realized I was set on a frail slab of moving stairs stretching straight through an enormous emptiness that would not stop, but only run alongside the ledge of the foyer, as it continued to loop back down to the bottom floor where it began. It was a moving arch that left it’s surviving passenger off not too many feet from where it started.

I wished I was back at the moment in the dream where I entered a Hollywood press conference late, wearing a fantastic gown that complemented my strong hip bones and softly squared off shoulders. Everyone unabashedly stole glances at me, including some men with thick bobs, wavy—dark, and styled—whose money boosted their collective (and therefore individual) sex appeal. I told myself they were budding directors.

The other young women/aging girls seated beside me at the front of the room weren’t hiding so well that they too were captivated by me. None of them budding directors, all of them girls I know in real life as pioneering homemakers. Capturing the fascination of these females was only thing more valuable to me than the steady hushed attention from the crowd of onlookers presumably involved in this VIP Q & A session. The occasional bulb going out and off like a silent white explosion shouting in the distance. My greatest hope was that the other girls would see that they couldn’t help to steal a look away from me to see if others were staring as well, and they were. Everyone was obsessed.

When it came time to be photographed arbitrarily I watched as the girls nervously, piously stepped onto the white tape X and, in lieu of posing, blushed. I instead was overcome by my dream self’s perception of the spirit of the great Marilyn Monroe. I held the moment, wrapping one arm around the torso, and the other around that one, plumping my cleavage up out of the dress said it was OK to look a lot, as much as you could, because I loved it. I loved them for it.

Standing on the white X, a harmony of cameras calling out to me in white echoes. All around me. My breasts, my arms, my hips. My eyes sought it all in, then closed, and I watched from inside as I pulled open a white, loud smile. I felt the light painted over my eyelids and again. Starting at the neck, I jostled my head from side to side, but beginning at the base of my spine, everything in slow motion. For uh uh moment, the world was in love, with me.

The escalator was getting closer to the top. An Indian woman from India hung over the brass railing. She was pointing a packet of papers resembling two tickets at me, shaking them to get my attention. Petrified, but brought back to my mission to get these tickets to their holders and finally to the seats.

In the dream I’d moved away from Los Angeles. And returned to find that it resembled the place I’d left and was, to my surprise, worse. Is a place just a place? Is it the same to be a beggar as it is to be a doctor? They’re both simply living lives. L. A. was darker, and stranger, the way the things we know take on a different shape or size or character all together and yet we know they’re meant to represent something else, something completely different in real life.

This sense of dream displacement was heightened by the fact that I was crashing with a half Greek guy who in real life desired me (heavily), lived alone (divorced in his mid twenties) in a remodeled garage with his dog, trying to start non-profit. And I last saw him turning back at the top of a hill in Echo Park, running away, as he crouched beside his mutt dog, who was having a mild seizure. It was purple, almost dark. I passed a lesbian couple walking their dogs and asked for directions, deciding to tell them that I was trying to get away from a real creep. I still wonder if they ran into him that night, or ever again, or ever.

Los Angeles was like a dark maze, a landscape of infinite unique characters meant for a role playing video game. So caught up in feeling lost, amazed, and ceaselessly entertained I couldn’t decide whom to trust—neither in the moment nor after the fact. Either no one, or everyone except the homeless. Except that in the end the homeless people were probably the most honest, wearing their intentions on their shabby sleeves.

The half Greek in the dream was the proud owner of this makeshift German WG (a group living community with cheap rent). His tenants were a couple other artists. One of whom was presumably queer and meanly showed me his collection of 80’s gadgets and toys.

I’m starting to understand why some people never leave home. I still haven’t traveled nearly as much of the globe as I plan to in my lifetime, and yet there are already too many impressions to contend with, too many moving ends to mend or sculpt together. Too many times going out to eat alone, paying the check, leaving a nice tip, then going to a bar alone to get drunk, avoid conversation, and ponder life. Studying the people around me, gaining nothing but forgettable impressions while childishly focusing on the impression I’m making: A very sad, strong, strange, lovely, youngish thing who finishes some drinks alone at the bar, leaves, looks for a conversation somewhere, but finds herself waking up in her bed at the time wondering where her next bed will be, what that stay will be like, and will she find a dancing partner one of these lonely days. She really just wants to dance with someone, someone sweet.

This half Greek person was angry with me in the dream. My lover from Los Angeles was almost non-existent. Never mentioned nor considered and never missed caused the dark flavoring of this stranger Los Angeles. Without my lone true angel to hold a lantern to LA into its honest hellish form. Without his love I had come to revisit a place of death.

There was an ominous car ride in the middle of the night whose queerness was so bland I hardly remember. Just dark stretches of emptiness antithetical to the mapping and actual physical makeup of LA, and the occasional blurry ball of light whizzing over our heads. Streetlights were mere accessory in certain Boulevards of LA, ones that weren’t residential, ones where everything was just on. Open. Running. Always waiting for you. They were interrogating me. Alex’s new roommates couldn’t believe I’d left LA. Couldn’t believe I’d come back, since I’d left. Were wondering how long I’d hold out this time, because they knew the truth. I wasn’t holding up in LA, not in a place so impossible. I was holding out. Holding out until something killed me or until I decided I needed my life, and left. Maybe that’s why so many people leave. They thought they’d come to live out their dreams, but decided that LA wasn’t a place for that. No, this was a place you went to die, to be destroyed, or to get raped, over, and over, and over again.

At the end of the ride, at least my portion, they dropped me off at some nowhere, in the blackness, on the side of the road. No one around, but I was OK to be alone and happy to be rid of them, the questions, the talk, and thoughts.


My actress friend was in from New York. She had a “Great Job” doing important things that required travel and brought her to LA to help organize a community of artists for a film in the Oscars. It didn’t matter except that she had a better job than me. The woman who shoved me onto the elevator was her lackey. I was there by my friend’s invitation and could only travel behind the scenes if I offered my services as a sort of gofer.

As my step had me approaching the Indian woman she began saying her last name at me. I scanned the clipboard. Whatever she was saying didn’t match, and the escalator seemed to be getting narrower. If I fell off this rail-less, slim-fitting person mover I would indeed drop to my death. It wasn’t the pain of hitting that scared me—that never even occurred to me. It was death itself, the unknown, loss, and the possible gain of only God (even if there’s no such being) knows what. I asked not hell.

Shaking my head at her as the escalator, only wide enough to house the width of three human feet, began its ride alongside the foyer floor before angling down for it’s decent. The names didn’t match. She was shocked. If it wasn’t her name, whose was it? After all, it was an Indian name. It must be a mix up. But I was sent to perform this one piece of duty. If I knowingly muffed it up I was a fairly shoddy friend, and I was not a professional. I wanted to be a professional. And yet, the pieces fit. She was, after all, Indian, and looking for—no, demanding—her two tickets. And, as well, she was the only person waiting for me after my lengthy and increasingly tapered escalator ride.

She could tell that I was giving in. She and another Indian larger Indian woman yanked me up over the brass railing. They were determined to get to the bottom of this issue, which was fine by me, because I was grateful be off that escalator and lying on sort of actual ground, and to hopefully finish this transaction by returning to the basement via the wide, carpeted, grand and safe stairway.

The day before our year anniversary was the day of my year anniversary with Los Angeles as well as the day I decided to leave my lover. That night he handed me a little box. The next day I’d be boarding an early morning flight to return home for my sister’s wedding. I opened it. Inside was a little piece of paper cut into the shape of a tiny heart with the words “YEAR ONE” printed on it. Meaning, it’s all about meaning. Year one sounded more like a death sentence than a celebration. More like a game show host saying “This is YEAR ONE of the rest of your life!” He points the microphone at me, the long wire resting on the floor, snaking off stage. I give him a look. A pause. I collect myself, inhale, kiss him on the cheek, turn and step away behind the curtain. Into the darkness, alone.

The doors opened to the great hall. The Oscars. The Indian women were gone like that, forgotten. I was out of my body, a wireless camera floating over the giant black and white rumbling that hardly resembled a grouping of individuals. Beyond the audience, to the stage, Nicole Kidman in pink, coming towards us on the white marble stage. Stunning. She was staring.

Then suddenly, the announcer describing the progression of her hair colors over the years, form plain Jane, natural, sandy brown to this red, red, red red that made her blue contacts Pop like a color scheme in Pop Art. She was a (real?) living beauty.

Back at the ranch the rustic lovely gal with a soul as strong as her horse settled into the saddle as he stamped back and forth in the dusty morning sunshine. Some attendants stood by, preparing her for the ride. But she was ready, a little timid, but that would soon go when the cool air was twisting around inside her top. She wanted that tingle, that fear of racing forward, willful, free, on the back of another free being. She held the reigns loose, but tight. She smiled to herself inside. Beautiful, she thought. And to look at her you’d know it. She was ready to ride.

The Lady from the Bakery (A Monologue)

"There’s a woman waiting and she’s no idea I’m watching. Mornings after the shower seeps into my cracks and I still ain’t waking I pace the carpet barefoot, making a soggy path with my feet. I can’t help looking on my old skin in the mirror and turning away onto the pattern of that bed spread. Yellow, green, and orange flowers puffin’ out like clouds’d make anybody wanna fall back over into sleep and forget about making breakfast or catching a bus in the cold for work.
I moved the curtain off and set myself down beside the old window. I try not to look at the bakery when I’m down out the on the street, cause the first month I moved in here I’d be there every morning for a doughnut or trying different cookies. One afternoon coming home I bought a cake for no good reason, till later I remembered about a niece’s birthday. I was getting pudgy and I could feel it in my body how it didn’t really want that sugary stuff.
There’s a dim light on inside. The thin lady’s pushing her trays of cookies onto shelves and switchin’ on display bulbs inside the glass cases. She knows what all of it tastes like; that’s how she stays so thin. I’ve seen her before leaving the shop carrying a tied up white cardboard box. She probably brings a box of fresh cookies with her to church on Sundays, people I bet know her as the lady from the bakery.
I used to have a box of old recipes from my mother. My sister asked for them for her first daughter who was supposedly something in the kitchen. I called up my mother and asked if she minded me giving them away, cause I didn’t cook much anymore, nothing extravagant. She didn’t give me an OK right off. She was gonna have to think on it she said. I didn’t see why, and she told me that there’d be hollerin’ in heaven if those precious works were just tossed about in the wind like yesterday’s paper. It’s a family bakery so I’m thinking they must be sacred recipes from family long ago in eastern Europe.
Her hair ain’t tied up too well for a gal around food, but she’s wearing gloves it looks like. I bet that’s a cheerful job, surrounded by sweet dough smells and pretty pinks and turquoise icing and the fifty types of wedding cakes that line the three walls. People’ve got to be happy in a bakery, coming to get something good cause they’re going somewhere better. No body every brought cookies to a funeral home viewing.
She’s turned the overhead lights all on. I turn back at my little home, so quiet in the morning and nights. I take my watch from the dresser and snap it’s gold lock over the hairless ring around my wrist. The second hands snapping forward. It’s five to seven, almost time to open."

ripped denim Saves Lives (A Musing/Dedication)

An army of Claire Danes taking over a small modern town constructed to facilitate the inhabitants’ illusions of living in a clean, Christian city where sunset smells like fresh popcorn. I know already that the meta-post-modern, celebratory mockery of the celebrity sphere (photographed in bleach-soaked beauty under dis-proportionate melon-ious jugs suggesting a crushed pair of vacuumed, unusable lungs) laid absently upon the normal land of chaos, coupons for abortions, preposterous graduation gowns, and rotten bananas (the cramped, swampy, forgotten fish tank from which we all must breathe) like the gentle 8.5 x 11 slice of paper nuzzling up next to its baby brother may infuriate you. I know you may be wondering if I am a hipster, or someone who stands at the ledge of a roof in a once sadly only seedy now slightly hip Shitville though formerly to the former ten bedroom Swanksville mansions (curbs with twin crimped boxes of white zin paid for with a welfare check beside those purchased absently with the river of absent parental funds) making projections about the world, about American TV in her head, ignoring everyone at this party, declining a glass of wine or a Keystone Ice, gesturing empty handed and pretending to admit without pride that she’s quit smoking cold turkey years ago and has actually made it cool to go to parties not to party, not even to connect, only to remind herself that there are no parties left to go to, there are no illusions left, because the world is sad, and fucked, and a much better place to live in once you’ve realized that God is not a word, not a person, nor a concept. God is giving up and handing your life over to lullabies that focus on the melody instead of the irony. God is buying new shoes and ignoring the ensuing bunions brought on by four inch heels and the crappy deck you’ll be wearing them on that will tear the material to shit, or your new roommate’s dog, or your brother’s dog, or the grimy curb, or the muddy back yard where you’ve taken the children to play. God is to believe in a woman smiling who doesn’t breathe or a diamond that sparkles because it is a rock of empathy and love that desires only to lure a genuine bliss-scented twinkle from your eye. God is to believe in a magical DJ spinning commercials for debt and cellulite removal spliced with bad Country, sappy slow Rock, and unearthly Pop. God is your worst nightmare. God is your ultimate fantasy. God is the motherfucker, master changeling haunting you and living inside the stuffing of your couch while you lazily, apathetically binge on coffee while fingering yourself and think of spreading your legs for an old boss. God is a dream. God is a joke. God is not a word; it’s a disease.

God is not Claire Danes—duh! and Sorry for insulting you while making a point…although I am sure people will insult you worse who intend to make no point whatsoever, so cut me some slack and bare with me here, please. My friend likes Claire Danes for a reason we can’t articulate; however, he can articulate why he doesn’t believe in a jelly bellied, bearded ogre slinging lightning bolts at his children, that likes to fuck virgins in the dreams of their sleep, and leave his bastard only son for dead, hanging at the top of a hill, naked, and sandwiched between criminals. That God sounds a lot more like someone you’ll meet at a bar than someone whose invisible, merciful feet you can bury your head in amongst anonymous victims of one special handicap: alcoholism; not “Not Knowing When to Quit”; just “Knowing Just Where to Start” (perhaps the first Muslims were recovering alcoholics with a sudden ocean of time on their hands—Why not try and make sense of this sober mess if we have to be sober? Only the sheer pain of sobriety could bring on such illusions as God).

[This song is for my faithful friends. You know who you are; careening; relentless; gorgeous, awkward bliss spasms.]

I tried to put myself in a drawer; one papered with twull print, that smelled like old, ornate, unused stationary, the matching pencil set that came sharpened but went unused. I thought I could be comfortable memorizing the patterns, conditions, and commitments of these people and their lifestyle; the Victorian mother ushering her two sons through the countryside; the baby chasing after hens and the older boy playing a song that neither moved nor inspired the heart, like Hot Crossed Buns, on his hand-me-down horn instrument, hitting the notes in sequence to reinforce the tune and muscle-memory and impose the knowledge that he had learned and mastered a song; and one song was enough.

I found myself drowning in the emptiness of this tidy, registered trademark version of what a life smells like, for this print I felt I was meant to inhabit in my natural progression as a middle class, educated, traveled, tall, white, Catholic American woman with exceptional bone structure. Though I don’t rip my clothes anymore, wearing them proud and torn the way I did in my early twenties, my one dimensional Victorian woman waits till everyone is looking and tears her blouse to expose and sunbathe her radiant, blubbery, mountain-ous, three dimensional boobies that like to dance, play hide and seek, go deep sea diving, and often offend others with their ingratiating, infectious joi de vivre that sends them giggling and howling at any occasion; these breasts grin at funerals and jig in traffic; these breasts don’t have mere personality, they are a spirit with the size and incantation of a bonfire that ripped Rome burning into the ground below sea level and character the color of fresh, lethal wounds exposing bone, organ, and some incredible, inevitable agony.

Best Fish Sandwich (A Short Story)

Sometimes you end up on a road you’d promised yourself that you’d return to someday—just wasn’t planning to find myself there alone and I certainly wasn’t expecting company after relaxing into the lonesomeness. I was myself one big planet when I burst through the door of that bar. Once I’d been jogging in unknown territory and passed a neon sign the size of a Chevy Impalla laid across the side of a thick brick square building stuck on a hum drum intersection on a road to nowhere or just about anywhere. It said BEST FISH SANDWICHES. I wasn’t too hungry and when that barkeep asked what I was after I told him I just wanted to have a look. The only other woman around was his assistant and she disapeared moments after I arrived. There were two TVs on and a small gang of blue collar men camped around the corner of the bar putting time on the clocks they like to watch with apathetic melancholy, hazed, unglued vision, and dead as a door nail reserve.
I went into the back room, the diner, and picked up a plastic menu off a false wooden booth. The lights were dim and the windows were blocked by old bar towels and blankets. The air was stale and silent. This menu professed to serve bar patrons as well as lodgers, I inferred that the Inn was upstairs and kept my questions to myself when I returned to the bar. I tried to give the men some sass talk, but no one was up for play. They just asked me if I was an English Student and I said I was done with school. A man who was sitting by himself acknowledged me and asked if I’d like a drink. I said yes and the bartender poured me a small beer into an hourglass shaped half pint and told me that I should come back some time for a fish sandwich. He said that during lent folks drive from all over the city on Friday nights just to have one; he said I wouldn’t believe how packed the place gets.
My friend at the bar wanted to know if I had a boyfriend. I said Hell No and that men were absolutely no good. He finished his beer and ordered himself another. He said he loved a woman once very much and that he’d wronged her and lost her and that he drank to remember and that he drank to forget--her and all kinds of stories. He was shacked up with his deceased mother’s second husband who was not his father and taking care of him as a testament to his faith in his mother and for nothing else. He asked if I ever wanted another boyfriend and I said I wasn’t sure—that I’d been hurt a lot. He wondered if I took any of what happened with men as my fault. After that I stopped saying things about how lousy men were and left off sharing anything about love.
He told me that his blood was half irish and half german. I said if that isn’t the hottest blood under the bloody sun. We laughed together. He said he used to sell drugs in the Hill District. He even got busted. I asked him what jail was like and he said that he didn’t know. He hadn’t served any time, instead he’d payed off a great lawyer who paid off a judge that got him out of a whole mess of jail and fines and bullshit. He said that this city was as crooked as they come; the bottom line is the only way to cross. I told him that was silly, if it was bad here, it was worse or just as terrible everywhere else. Corruption doesn’t choose just one city and plant it’s haunches, and even if it did we’ve got three rivers, greyhound busses, a postal service, and an airport to send it just about anywhere we like—even down to Texas if wer’e aiming for the moon.
I sipped my Coors Light real slow and studied his face. It was hard and soft like a baked grape turned raisin. Mushy beneath, but tight on top and pulled into creases by aging and dehydrating in the day’s rays. His color was red and even. His mouth was tight, dry, and tiny. His lips puckered when he spoke and his little eyes were steady with remeberance and shone the purest blue—like a baby. He said I love my neices and nephews. He smiled and told me his favorite niece loved to dance. She competed. She used to come over to his house; when he was upstairs working she’d be downstairs making a small girl’s ruckus. He’d holler down and ask what she was up to and she’d holler back just fooling around, but he said she knew she was trianing. She was always perfecting her moves. He couldn’t believe it. He said she competed to be the miss dance of Pennsylvanian and won. After that she went to Disney to compete and she won the national. He said she was incredibble. Everyone had said she was going to win. He didn’t go to Florida, but he saw the tape when they returned. He started to cry. He said she was so incredible, it was so beautiful how talented and hardworking and humble she was. He said that she made him so happy; she was just a little girl, but she was so smart. He said she got good grades in school too.
I thanked him for the beer, kissed him on the cheek, told him he was a good guy, and left. After that I drove to another place I'd never been but had meant to see. It was a bowling alley and it was packed. I sat at the bar by myself and watched through a giant glass window men approaching the lanes and firing their balls at the pins. One man in particular had beautiful form. Every man's style struck me as a keen expression of his impression of himself. Men would come in the bar to order beers and try to start up a conversation with me or stand close enough in silence possibly waiting for me to begin an interaction. But I just sat there and sipped my beer and watched the men through the window. I went to leave and a man chased me down the stairs and stopped me. He apologized for being so forward but wanted to aske me out on a date. I said I was surpised only one man had run after me. He asked if I had a boyfriend. I said no. He asked if I wanted to go out. I said no and thanked him for the invitation.

Ina (A Short Story)

Ina wore three strings of imitation pearls ascending in size and a stab of raspberry lipstick scribbled over her sardine lips. A white powder mask cloaked her face like a fog. She was tiny in every direction. She had old teeth and several black molars surfaced as she spoke. Still, hers was a sweet smile. Up close she smelled like those small bars of soap old ladies take from hotels and save in drawers. She was perched behind the shopping cart I first saw her sailing over the empty parking lot at dawn. Far off she was a dark blob over the glowing ground. She looked like a poem or a strange kind of song, one without lyrics or music. I had turned off the main road, headed for the grocery store. I pulled in between the yellow lines and her details came into focus. She inched along toward the entrance, her shadow wedded to the metal cage.

I spotted her inside, beside a wall of dry goods. Her legs looked like the skinny bars of crutches and she had clear jelly boots snapped over her flats. I tried not to embarrass Ina by staring in case they were special shoes. She must have caught me, because she said that she had bad feet like her grandfather. I thought she would tell me a story about how terrible her grandfather’s feet were. Her voice sounded excited, and she chirped like a kazoo. She said that as a child she lived in the Pennsylvania countryside. One afternoon her grandfather had gone out for a walk. When he hadn’t returned the family started to worry, so they went out looking. Ina said it was fine summer weather. He had sat down beside a stream that she said is much deeper now, more like a river. And resting there, under the tree beside the stream, he had gone away. And that’s how they found him. She said he was like her. Ready to move, hardly slept, and always up to something.

I hadn’t expected to meet her inside the store. I released the greasy cart handle and straightened my posture as I examined the contents of her cart. There were several boxes of chocolate Ensure, a family size package of Kit Kats, and a big bottle of blue Windex. Ina was admiring the flowered pattern of my sundress. She stopped and smiled at me in a searching way, like she was forgetting something. I was tempted to ask her why she’d brought her own cart. I glanced at Ina’s bare knuckles. She must have caught me, because she revealed that she had never married. Then she said that her mother had always asked if she would ever settle down. Ina’s answer was still the same: She didn’t have the time. Ina said that when her family moved to Pittsburgh she found her own apartment. When she finished at her clerking job in the train station she returned home to do some mending, sewing, or other kind of work. Her frail hunched body was no longer capable of precise, hurried movements. Dreaming up a younger version of Ina proved no less difficult than trying to imagine myself as being so much older.

Ina giggled like a woman in the presence of an admirer. I gave her a quizzical look, and Ina announced that she was a big fan of Kit Kats. She stored them in a Tupperware container in her refrigerator for a rainy day. She looked past me down the isle, like she was watching rain fall on the next town over. Ina said she had wanted to sell candy bars in the shop near her apartment. She told her brother and he said that he knew the owner there. He offered to take her down and introduce her, but Ina wanted to go alone. The manager liked her immediately. He offered Ina a cashier position at thirty cents an hour and she took it. Ina said she could leave the train station at five o’clock and arrive at the shop well before the shift at six. Sometimes, between her shifts, she liked to stop at Isaly’s. She would sit in a booth by the window, watch the commuters outside, and enjoy a cup of coffee or a scoop of butter pecan ice cream.

I pulled my cart back on purpose and let the wheel slowly crush my big toe. Ina kept talking. She said she stayed busy at the shop keeping everything in order, insisting that she was a hard worker. Once, the manager had asked Ina how she would respond if a thief came in demanding all the money from the register. Ina said she would not let him take it. The manager couldn’t believe it—he laughed. He told Ina that she could lose her life, but she didn’t care. The robber wouldn’t get that money—not from her. The manager said not to do that. If a person came in demanding the money, she was to give it to him.

A muffled voice announced something over the P.A. system. Ina and I shared a look of confusion. I told her that I had never ridden on a train. Then I asked about the station, expecting her to describe scenes from old Bing Crosby pictures, with women wearing fur muffs and singing gay show tunes all crammed inside a cozy club car. Her voice was proud and hollow like chords perfectly exhausted from an ancient organ. Ina said that all the other workers were afraid of the manager. She had taken her clerking job seriously, but she wasn’t scared of the boss. She treated him like he was anybody else. After all, they were the same age. Once, he called Ina into his office and asked her if she had a boyfriend or if she was hoping to get married. She told him the same thing she told anyone else; she worked two jobs and maintained her home and there was no time left after that.

I wanted to see her laugh, so I told Ina that my Gram was Bob Barker’s biggest fan and asked if she liked The Price is Right. Ina said she hardly ever watched Television, and she never turned it on in the morning. She kept busy walking around her apartment. Ina had an old pair of scissors she used to do clippings. She said you’d be surprised how much more you could fit in a garbage bag if you cut the newspaper into smaller pieces. Then she said that when people came back from the war they were given their old jobs at the train station. It wasn’t uncommon for the replacements to be laid off, but Ina was never dismissed. She thought her boss had kept her around because he felt sorry for her. Ina chuckled and looked up at the fluorescent lights as if heaven waited just on the other side.

My mother sent me to the store for a box of baking powder that morning. I’d searched my purse twice to be sure that I’d forgotten my phone. I knew she’d be calling to ask what was taking so long. She had undoubtedly begun entertaining abduction scenarios or imagining me in a horrific car accident. Ina couldn’t know how this agitated me towards action. She simply recognized my fading attention as I broke eye contact to consider the array of decaffeinated teas stacked beside us. She started to let me go—saying a young girl like me surely had things to do. And I did want to go—I had plenty of things to do. As well, the conversation had gone on for so long that what was really happening was no longer deniable, even for her. A young woman was humoring an older woman for a small window of her day.

Ina took a step, but I grabbed the green wallet from my cart and held it up for her to see. I told her that I had three hundred dollars inside. She sunk back into her stance. Then I offered Ina the only reason a friendly young woman goes around carrying so much cash (and so many ones). I made my living as a waitress. I told her that the night before I’d almost lost it. I was driving home when I realized I’d left the wallet behind at the coffee shop where I’d been reading. I went back and searched my booth and the ladies room, but it was gone. I hurried over to the barista. He asked a couple of questions and checked behind the counter. Then he handed me the wallet; I opened the flap and every last bill was there. Ina looked energized by my story, like a spring. I searched for a way to keep it going. Something relative to ask an old woman—I knew what the Windex and Ensure were for, and then it hit me like a box of wigs. I asked Ina if she had a cat.
Ina squeezed her little nose. Sadly, she’d been blessed with allergies. But she said that her favorite Uncle had lived out in the country with his pet cat. He had bad feet like his father—her grandfather. He was older and liked to sit in a chair by the window. She said that when this particular cat was a baby it was the very biggest in the litter. But as the cats grew older this one stayed the same size. I stopped listening for a minute while she talked about the cat. I assumed I’d be standing there for another ten minutes, and I should at least decide on the tea I was planning to purchase along with the baking powder for my mother.

Ina dropped her chin and drew a furled fist into her chest. Gently, she began to pet one hand with the other. She said that her Uncle enjoyed looking out at the country, watching for the occasional car, and this particular cat had made a habit of perching itself on his shoulder. She chuckled, she said people used to come by and say what a funny thing it was. Then, one day, when the fur all over his face finally got to bothering him—not to mention the weight of this old cat—her Uncle shoed it off and moved his chair outside. The cat got the message, sort of. After that, while her Uncle watched the scenery from the porch, the little cat crouched under his chair. Ina said she heard what people said, but she knew that animals weren’t just animals. There was something going on in there. I noticed that her boots’ clear soles created the illusion of space between the floor and her feet. Ina looked like the incarnation of a sprite or a perennial. It wasn’t hard to believe she was someone who could understand animals.

Ina cupped her hip and said it was a falsie. She said after the operation her brother’s wife insisted that she move into a bigger apartment. Ina’s home was an efficiency in an assisted living community for the elderly. Ina heard that the couple living in the two bedroom across the hall were moving out. She phoned the building manager and he confirmed. Ina’s brother and his wife were pleased and offered to help her move. They told her she needed to start spending her money on herself, instead of on everyone else. Then I noticed her purse. A turquoise rectangle of leather hung from her shoulder by a long chord thick as a telephone wire.

Ina said she enjoyed talking to her nieces and nephews on the phone; they were all college graduates. She said they worked all kinds of jobs at different hours, so she didn’t like to bother them by calling. Ina had worked out her own method. She would wait for someone to call. If she answered then they would both hang up and Ina would call back so that she could pay the charges. I imagined her pacing around her apartment, glancing at the phone, then looking out the window or sitting at the kitchen table to cut up the morning paper. I thought Ina would give me her phone number and ask me to call her. But she just stood there, gripping the cart and looking into my eyes, and, for Ina, I tried not to look away.

Goodbye Honey (A Short Story)

I used my tongue to examine the texture of my teeth while my co-worker drew directions on a napkin. He unbuckled and thanked me for the ride, and I said I was glad I could help. His pregnant wife was standing in the driveway shoeless. I reversed the car and they waved goodbye, shining in the white space stretching from my Volkswagen Golf. I left the napkin on his seat and guided the wheel in no particular direction. Rarely straying from my routine, I decided to make this trip a true detour. Traffic had settled. I was buzzing down a fluorescent Boulevard feeling the lightness of a place I’d never been when a glass storefront caught my eye. Something unknown had attracted me, and I found myself pulling over to park. The cement glittered as I walked back to the restaurant. I watched a long curious woman moving towards me. As we passed each other it felt okay to be lost, stopping to roam an unfamiliar area.
Scenes of Thai villagers living and working hung on the walls. Some ambient music came from a stereo at the bar. I sat down, rolled up my cuffs, and looked out the window façade beside me. The air smelled of sesame, spices and sweet coconut. It was empty except for the incredibly long Asian girl coughing and shuffling towards me. I really had to look up; she was taller than a coat rack. She sneezed and peeked two teary eyes over her notepad. She smiled like a bowling ball splitting an arrangement of pins.
“What’ll it be there fella?”
I had never heard a southern drawl sung by an Asian girl taller than a baby tree. A small orange flower fell from her hair when she coughed. Something about her particular combination of elements touched and twisted me. She was one of a sweet kind. One strange treasure hidden in an unremarkable Thai restaurant at dinnertime. Unknown and untapped otherwise and entirely mine—in a way. I breezed through the menu that her lacquered peach nails pressed into the table. I ordered Pad Thai and the Chrysanthemum tea she’d recommended, saying it was, “Real sweet an’ nice.”
A new sequence of dominos had appeared in my life, all resembling a sugary stele appropriately named Honey. It inspired in me a new generosity. But she didn’t tear a hole in my pocket by going the extra mile. Truth is, there was very little for her to do, except smile. After that, I was bought and sold. Honey’s smile was like a three-inch vacation or a window into the eternal respite. And she kept it up. She shoved the bills into her apron and walked off, but I caught her sweet shameless reflection in the dead TV mounted on the wall. I didn’t tip Honey for her work. I paid her for being special.
The next night, en route from the office, I blew through eleven yellow lights. This time I started at the top of the menu and ordered from the Curries. Honey returned to the safety of the counter and started scribbling. She was either doodling or doing a crossword. She struck me as both types; it was hard to get a read on her. My nostrils tingled and flared over a bowl of red curry powder, hot coconut milk, and vegetables. I came back the next night and every night that followed—including weekends. After a month I’d eaten the entire menu, start to finish. Heading home one evening it occurred to me that my return might appear as strange. My frequenting The Thai Palace had nothing to do with establishing a new routine or making a new friend or eating the food. But Honey never quivered. She would bare her green light smile and I’d exhale any fear of feeling like a stalker. In any case, no use for her wasting time considering the circumstances. She probably just categorized me as some kind adventurous eater who’d had the unfortunate experience of discovering Thai food in his late twenties.
I returned to The Thai Palace always around the same time. Each night Honey approached my table carrying a pot of hot Chrysanthemum tea. We exchanged pleasant hellos and she offered me no more than her description of the specials. I acknowledged Honey’s wishing-you-a-Happy-Birthday smile with my best impression of her visage. While I was eating she scribbled in her notebook, disappeared, or arranged bottles of tea inside a cooler. I didn’t print my number over Lincoln’s reposed gaze. She didn’t know my name, but I admired what I believed about her. That at her age she’d already learned what it took me several versions of heartbreak to understand. There is majesty in the unknown. Truth has no real words.
Monday morning I received an email from my superior. The attachment read “Edison, Parker Mr., E-ticket USAir Flight 1593.” My company sends me to San Francisco several times a year to confer with other human relations executives. It’s a trip I wouldn’t take otherwise. I departed the next morning. An easy flight, perfect Northern California weather, and the front desk welcomed me with a gentle, un-LA demeanor. I placed my brown Kenneth Coles beside my suitcase, uncurled on the couch, pressed a button on the remote, and the shades drew themselves.
The four-day conference was an intensive blur, and it wasn’t until Saturday morning that I thought of Honey. I skipped breakfast and walked until I found myself alongside the cable car route. The line ended before I’d reached one cherished west coast historical site, Ghirardelli’s Chocolate Factory. The wind tossed cool salty air around me as I devoured The Alcatraz Rock, Ghirardelli’s best sundae. I stared at the old prison across the Bay. A family appeared; two children went screaming down the hill past their parents. Then I thought of Honey. I focused on her and the few details I had collected. They were nice details, dependable, simple, consistent, and distant. They had nothing to do with me really, and that’s what made them so perfect. That with Honey I had no affect, no say, and nothing to offer but an extra twenty percent. And all those few dollars said were, “Keep doing what you’re doing. I think it’s pretty OK.”
When I returned there were bills, groceries, and laundry to catch up with. One night I opened the refrigerator to grab an apple and I remembered Honey. I had let it become two weeks. I rushed out of the apartment and started the car, wondering if I’d locked the front door. Up to that point, I hadn’t considered Honey romantically, but that whole ride I just played with her in my mind. I dressed her in white lingerie that slipped over her pert breasts, then in a black suit with no shirt on underneath, like a model. I didn’t want to kiss her. I just didn’t know what she looked like when she wasn’t wearing grey pants and a white shirt with a green square in the center.
Honey was off, but I stayed for the meal. I felt something—maybe sadness—when I peeled open my chopsticks and I couldn’t sense her hanging out across the room. A teenage punk rock version of the owner set a plate of the house Pad Thai in front of me. He bowed, stepped outside, lit a cigarette, and watched the traffic. I looked back. His father, a Thai immigrant in his sixties, was standing behind the counter with his arms crossed. I could tell that he was staring at his son, even without being able to see his eyes.
Then, a very strange feeling unearthed in my chest, like a seed sprouting its first green. Something simultaneously nostalgic and new. Then I placed it; it felt like prayer. I hadn’t prayed over a meal since Christmas dinner at my parents’ in Milwaukee. Though, that was more like happy collective mumbling. I squeezed my hands together under the table and stretched my head forward as far down as it could go. It just happened. My heart bloated, and then it tore. It felt like a parachute opening. I laughed to myself, marveling at the power of curry. I felt like a rookie boxer, but on the inside of the punching bag. Something in me wanted out—fast—but I had no words. I rode it out until my blood was redistributed evenly. When I started to eat my dinner it was still warm, just not steaming.
I opened the door and took in a bowl of stale city air. I looked up at the murky sky, all those stars obscured by electric lights. I drove under the speed limit with the windows down and listened to the traffic. When I got home I turned to the passenger seat and imagined Honey sitting there beside me. I would give her hand a squeeze, get out, go around the car, and open her door. I tried to picture her smiling, but it wasn’t the same really—I could remember that much. I unbuckled, reclined the seat, and shut my eyes. I woke up to an ache in my neck and my watch read 2:48AM. I remembered very little about Honey, but I knew she was gone.

Girls' Day Out (A Short Story)

Can you believe this traffic Margie?
Take a right there and we can take a short cut up that way.
I don’t know that area.
I do Sue…just turn up here and I’ll show you.

Sue wailed on her horn. Everyone in front of her wailed on their horns and the people behind her began to wail as well. There was an accident a mile down the road. A man opened his glove compartment to look for a tissue, ran the absolute tail of a yellow light and a mother rushing her son and his two friends to soccer slammed into him. Spencer had been standing up in the middle of the mini-van entertaining the Charlie and PJ with a story and flew forward into and through the windshield while Mandy, secured behind her seatbelt, pushed her entire body into the break pedal. After the ambulance and two cop cars arrived Mandy, Charlie, PJ, and Rick were all examined and reported to be physically fine. After breaking through the window of the mini-van Spencer slammed head first against the door of the sedan and his neck snapped. The ambulance and EMT persons served a transport to the hospital. A police report was filed, insurance information was exchanged, Spencer and Charlie’s parents were phoned, and a road crew was called in to clean up the mess.

Wait till you see this house up here on the right…don’t you love those curtains?
Which ones—Oh! Those are darling! The yellow, right?
Yes. I just love them—the houses up this way are so cute and nicely kept.
I don’t like that one.

Sue pointed to a big purple house with yellow columns and gargoyles at the entrance.

Me either, but I think it’s kind of funny having it on the block.
There’s nothing funny about an ugly house. If I lived on this street I’d have it demolished or get a petition going for them to re-paint it to look not so god-damned hideous.
OK. Left here.
Thank God we’re out of that damn traffic.
You can say that again.
I could sure use a cup of coffee. I haven’t really eaten all day.
Well do you want to stop for a snack up here, there’s a quaint little street where they sell little knick knacks and all that. There’s an adorable truffle shop and this homey cutesy coffee place I just adore—and I haven’t been there for almost ever.
Well I have to get this gift for Lizzie’s shower, but we can stop off for a moment. I don’t really feel like cooking dinner—damnit I’ve got that chicken thawing on the counter. Oh whatever, let’s just stop and have a little something. Do they have muffins?
Yes. And their scones are so good…the last time I was there the baker wrote out the recipe for me.
Ok.
Take a right, left at the stop sign, and then right at the light.

Sue turned the corner and parked in the first available spot.

That was lucky.
Where’s this place?
It’s at the other end of the block. It’s called Jaime’s Nest. Jaime is a woman. I think she and her husband own it together.
OooOOoo! Let’s stop in this little jewelry shop.

Good afternoon ladies. What can I help you with today?
Oh nothing really.
We don’t need anything. I’ve just never been on this street before…and we’re having a girl’s day so we’re checking out the shops.
Let me know if you need anything. Over here is forty-percent off.
Are chokers still in fashion Margie?
I don’t think so, but a lot of things on this street are Victorian looking. I think it’s a neighborhood theme.
I can’t believe I’ve never been here before. I love Victorian things.

The saleswoman took it as a good sign that the women hadn’t gone directly to the Sale table.

Would you ladies like to see something special? This collection is new.
Sure.
Of course!

Sue and Maggie walked over to the counter as the sales woman exited behind a navy velvet curtain. She returned with—
What a beautiful tiara! I had one of those when I was a little girl. My father bought it for me and I used to wear it everywhere.
You are too much Sue…my Becky wore one for her dance recital last year, but it was plastic. It came with the costume.
Oh let me hold it. Isn’t that darling?
Those are real crystals. Real silver. Look at the fine weaving and careful craftsmanship.

Sue and Maggie saw the sticker on the back. It said Made in Taiwan. Well I don’t have any use for a tiara now.
Never did, never will.
You getting anything here?
Not that I see.
Me either—Thanks so much!
Yes, thank you.
We’re off.

Sue glanced back at her car, then walked over and tugged on the handle. Maggie followed behind.

You ready to go already Sue?
No, just checking to make sure I locked the darn thing—do those look like storm clouds Margie?They sure do Sue.
We’d better get down to your little café before that thing starts spraying.

The women walked along the street pressing their purses between their waists and their arms. They passed a French restaurant, a music store, two card shops, and—
What is this place?
It’s an art gallery…I think.
Are those—

Dead bodies were hanging from the ceiling and encircling a pile of dead children amassed at the center of the concrete floor. Not only were—

They’re puking on each other!

But they were also—

Having sex!

With animals…in their eye sockets. A naked woman stood pissing on the pile of children, some of whom were puking and some of whom were fucking puppy dogs in the face and some of whom were fucking puppy dogs or cat skulls while throwing up. Instead of nipples two large curved cocks grew out of the woman’s breasts. She appeared to be screaming and tearing a giant technicolor American flag into halves. She had enormous purple dread locks rising out of her skull like great rivers that leapt down all over and grew around the ethnically diverse dead children, across the concrete, up along the walls, over the ceiling and down wrapped around the necks of four dickless, faceless hanged men. In place of their genitals and countenances were red fleshy craters. The figures arms and feet were bound with purple hair. A message was painted across the glass façade in white paint. RAPE MURDERS LIFE A puddle of urine surrounded the pile of bodies and four puddles of blood could be seen, one beneath each of the well hung men.

I don’t believe this…this, this—THIS! This is disgusting—and wrong!
Sue I think it’s just art.
That is not art. That is sickening and vile, no one should have to see that. We’re leaving.

Sue grabbed Maggie’s arm and led her away down the street.

I can’t believe that the people in this neighborhood would want something like that right there in the middle of everything.

There were several other couples casually strolling the street.

Maybe they don’t mind it? It is there after all.
Well maybe these are tolerant people. I definitely will not be moving into an area like this…certainly not this one.
I’m so sorry that upset you Sue. Let’s just go in here and get a nice cup of tea and forget all about that. We can cross the street and walk back to the car the other way…or better yet, we can go back a block and walk through the residential area.
I don’t have time for that. Besides the houses will probably just be lined in gargoyles or some stupid Halloween decorations.
You’re right Sue. The lawns are probably strewn with used tampons.

This made Sue laugh. Margie held the door for her as they entered—

Oh my—how lovely! How perfectly adorable, Jaime’s Nest you said?
Yes.
Here we are—Let’s sit at the table by the fire.
Great idea.
Let’s see…wow look at all the pastries in here—oh those muffins look divine. And they have carrot cake, my favorite-est!
Hi Girls!

A short, short haired woman rose up from behind the counter. She wore a long sleeved tie dye T-shirt under an apron. A popular Sunday comic was screen printed on the apron. It was a simple sketch. There was a rectangle. Above the rectangle was the title of the comic: Lake Michigan. Inside the rectangle was a concave shape and in angled print the words Made in China were scrawled across the X-Ray view of the lake’s bottom.

What can I serve up for you ladies?
I have the most darling apron at home—I really only wear it in the fall. But it has a great turkey in the foreground and this Pilgrim behind him saying “Nice legs!” And the turkey’s eyes are bulging and his eyebrows are raised. It’s too cute.
All my good aprons have winter themes. I can hardly stand to wear an apron let alone cook this time of year. It’s too hot.
Do you ladies need a little more time?
No we’re just gabbing it up—girls’ day, you know…
Of course, well, you’ve come to the perfect spot. Everything is baked fresh daily. And we have fresh coffee. Mochas. Espresso. Fresh brewed Iced tea. Whatever you’d like.

Just then Sue saw a photograph of a young man in uniform held against the fridge behind a yellow ribbon magnet.

Forgive me, but do you know that young man in the picture?
I do indeed. He’s my son.
That’s what I thought.
God bless him and God bless you.
Well thank you for asking and for the kind words. We miss him so much.
How long has he been overseas if you don’t mind my asking? I have three children of my own; five, eight, and eleven.
He was away almost two years. And he’s been gone now almost three, certainly got us hippie blooded atheists thinking about some kind of god…that one’s probably more accessible than the ones we should really be mad at.
Oh my. I’m so sorry.
It’s all right. We keep the picture up because we want to remember him. I don’t mind talking about—

The short woman bulked, her eyes bloomed with tears, she sucked in a quick breath, pulled out a handkerchief and snatched away the tiny blobs of salt water. She exhaled and smiled.

Kids are rebellious. They don’t get it. Who knows? Maybe he wouldn’t have joined if his parents weren’t so enthused by anti-establishment memorabilia…
Well I think this is a fine establishment and I would love a cup of hot coffee and a vanilla cranberry muffin.
Of course…and for you dear?
I’ll have a lemon scone and a hot coffee.
You ladies have a seat and I’ll bring it all over.

The short woman started setting things up behind the counter and Margie and Sue plopped down in the giant soft armchairs beside the fireplace and dropped their purses beside them.

Boy oh boy…what a day it’s been.
I know, I thought we were home free after getting out of that blasted traffic.
Well we’ll feel better after something to eat Sue.
I hope so. I feel terrible about bringing up that poor woman’s son.
She didn’t mind.
If she did she hid it well—at least it got me to stop thinking about all that disturbing garbage.
I think that’s kind of the point of that kind of art Sue.
Art to upset people? Art to give people nightmares?
Well no, but I’ve read that making art about a traumatic experience helps people to move forward and away from it.
Where did you read that?
In a women’s magazine.
Well my mother’s dead and I never painted a picture of it.
OK ladies.

The short haired woman placed two giant mugs of coffee on the table between Sue and Margie. Then she set down a plated muffin, a plated scone, cream, and sugar.

Will there be anything else? A glass of water perhaps.
I’m all right.
I’ll have a glass.
OK, make it two.
Be right back ladies.
See—this is art.

Sue held up a mug depicting Van Gough’s sunflowers.

I love this mug. It makes me happy. It’s pretty and friendly and there’s nothing strange about it.
Van Gough was a pretty crazy guy you know…I read about him. He was a vagabond, a hermit, and a stalker.
Oh I don’t care about all that. None of it matters, just look at the lovely flowers—what’s on yours?

Margie turned her mug around towards Sue. There was a shiatsu dressed in a sailor’s jacket and cap balancing on his hind legs on a rainbow beach ball.

Well that’s just adorable—Sue laughed—And it makes me laugh!

The short haired woman set two glasses of water on the table and walked away. Sue and Margie stopped conversing and took their plates and set them on their laps. They sat in silence eating their snacks and watching the predictable flames of the gas fire. Just then a very short woman with pale skin and slim eyes wearing an all white pantsuit slipped inside the nest. She walked over towards the women.
Excuse? Someone say two lady come down to here? You the women stand outside my space—yes?
Excuse me?
You want to come see? I show you. You buy old paintings.
No, no—What’s she talking about Margie?
I think she thinks we were someone who wanted to buy art from that gallery.
That crap—hah!

Sue turned away to show she was ignoring the conversation.

I’m sorry. I think you were waiting for someone else. We don’t buy art.

Sue decided to rejoin the conversation saying—

Oh we buy art, but we don’t buy garbage. We throw it out.
Excuse? A lady call today. She say two womens come to buy paintings.
I’m sorry that was not us.
OK. So sorry. So sorry. You enjoy. So sorry.

The small woman left.

I hope that’s not her art. I would never expect that out of such a tiny person—you know what? I can’t talk about it anymore.
It’s fine Sue.
Let’s finish this coffee and get out of here.

The women returned to the counter and paid the bill. They said nothing more about the woman’s dead son. The short haired woman said thank you and Maggie and Sue left.

Looks like that cloud just passed right over.
That’s nice for us.
Yeah, I get worried driving in the rain. I’m so afraid I’ll have an accident.
Do you want to cross the street Sue?
No, let’s just walk fast and ignore it.

And just as the women walked past the gallery some action inside demanded their attention. The tiny pale woman in the white pantsuit was hopping in place on the other side of the the words RAPE MURDERS LIFE waving and smiling. They couldn’t help but look. Then they couldn’t help but laugh.

If that isn’t a ridiculous sight I don’t know what is.

The tiny woman came to the door.

You lady want to come in? See my painting?

We can’t. And we won’t!

Sue gestured to the pile of children mounted by the naked woman.

This is a disgrace!

OK…OK…You think is scary. OK…you come, I show you pretty…so beautiful you be happy again. Come see now.
What do you think Sue?
You cover face—cover eyes! Follow—I show you!
Oh Lord—oh fine let’s just get it over with.

Sue put her hands over her eyes and took Margie’s hand who followed the woman into the back room. She turned on the light that pointed at a giant canvas hung on the wall. Sue opened her eyes and looked at the painting.

Is that a mother and child?
Yes. Mother and son.
Did you paint this?
It not mine. Young lady. She very good, very nice, very good.

She smiled and moved her hand around before her face.

So pretty. She very pretty too.

The tiny woman pointed out at the gallery—

That her too. She make many art.

She laughed. Sue and Margie were looking at the painting on the wall. The palate was basic, shades of pink. The lines were soft and simple; a nude woman curled around a small baby.
You like? Not for sale. I show you sale.

She showed the women a series of slides. The paintings were of flowers. The women agreed that they were all very beautiful.

You like to buy?
Sue you could get one for Lizzie…
Did you see these prices? I don’t think so.

After the tiny woman put the slides away the women asked to look at the painting on the wall a little while longer. The tiny woman said yes and left the room. Sue and Margie stayed long enough to forget about time. The woman watched them from outside the door. They appeared transfixed.

That really is a beautiful painting.
Yeah I guess this trip wasn’t totally worthless.
Because we got to see this incredible piece of art?
Well no, I mean, it’s nice, but I’m just glad I figured out what to get Lizzie?
You did?
Yeah I was thinking about it the whole time we’ve been standing here.

The tiny woman came back in.

So sorry not for sale.
It’s all right.
You come back please. I take you out—come!
Sue covered her eyes and took Margie’s hand who followed the tiny woman to the door. The women exchanged thank you and Sue and Margie walked back towards the car.

Just don’t look back Sue.
Trust me I won’t.
So what are you getting Lizzie?
Van Gough mugs—those’ll be perfect in her new home.

Hiking the Grand Canyon (A Poem)

I have dreamt about you my whole life Grand Canyon
As a child I knew,
“There’s a tear in the earth out there;
Somewhere people (and I) need to go.”
A place where folks scream ECHO!
Into a break that consumes shouts
And your answer back comes in the shade
Of peach clay and the sound of a donkey’s nay
Carrying the wide tourists up the cliff side
An easy ride on an animal’s strained hide
The day I finally climbed down into you
Wedged between your smudges of hot orange rock
And splashes of acid green cacti
I bedded in a hot tent beside lizards
And I woke (surrounded by crows) in search of the Colorado River
And at noon I stripped (swarmed by bugs)
And left my hiking boots on the shore to bake out the sweat
Set myself into your cool song
I submerged into silence
And swallowed the rushing voice of a great split
Of the distance between one thing

Untilted (A Poem)

There are pink slippers on my fingers that pad with a silky detached manner over these keys.
Attempting to create a force that seperates my knowing the path from the path knowing me.
The sky paints my pupils a plane gray today and my heart cools to stone.
But the ribbon red chords of hair spiral down and leap out across my vision.
And my soft gaze is assaulted by the vicious hunger of this spirit.
This origin that lives eternal in my mind fastened at the ledge of IMAGINATION History's highest cliff. (Honest Horror. and Tragic Truth.)
Frozen to the slimmest precipice rising and titling over growing needles of sand.
Every pore in me yawns and our thousand hearts contained within each miniature orifice simultaneously send out invitations to tiny pins to pierce in Saturday night.
For sharp, true objects to seek entry by racing force so passionate to appear soulless.
So brilliant to appear bland, how white is the container for all colors, including the ones I've never seen that some say live only in heaven (and I believe keep perfect cousins in hell).
I am the painter wanting to be painted.
And the painted wanting to paint.
I am the dragon's tooth and the pond's increasing scum.
I am the bed that's forever empty and the traveller forever lost.
I am bored at the truth and delighted by the lie.
I embrace bee stings and the way your flesh burns and the world dispears when your skin opens itself by a small tear (engaged by the world outside).
I am mashed into a paste and spread across perfectly placed bricks holding this entity together.
I am crumbling to bits on one end, letting go of the mural friends made together of friends making a mural together about friends making a mural together.
I am full where I am empty.
And false where I am full.
I am dead upon awakening.
And hungrier when I'm eating than when I'm starving, waiting in line for my fill.

Tub of Legs (A Poem)

I have risen and the morning sounds like the incessant cooling action of my refrigerator

The counter top is riddled with dirty dishes and empty containers

Bed sheets are in a twist and spilling over onto the floor

Crumbs and dust line the corners and creases

Photographs of my grandmother, girlfriends, and sisters sit about singing sweet hellos to me

I want to bathe in women

Feeling their smooth legs tangle around me

To bury my head in their naked breasts

and my face in their empty crotches

for protection, for warmth

For a reminder of me, to be closer to myself

I AM A WOMAN

So be it. Thanks and Praise to the Goddess who came before me.

Friendship (Flash Fiction)

There was an old woman who often had her friend over for tea. The friend was even older than her old, old friend. Among other details this friend had wobbly hands. And with these wobbly hands she held the same cup each time she came for tea. And without fail the very old, old friend would drop this cup on the ground, admitting the fault of her wobbly, old hands. The old woman would smile and collect the pieces of this cup, set them aside, and sop up the spill with a handy kitchen rag. After the old, wobbly friend had gone, the woman would go to her drawer and take out the glue. Each time the old, old friend returned for tea she would drink from the same cup, that grew larger with glue seams, and the friends would converse as usual.

Bridge Over the River (A Prose Piece)

The river splayed her legs before me; one long, wet piece glimmering in both directions with panes of light settling in sporadic patterns, taking on reflections and teaching them that a tree is not what it would have you see. The river between two bustling trunks of land knows better and has the gentle faith to bathe rock, stones, small islands, wood planks, duck bellies, and wanton roots. Her voice comes out like a kind warrior caught between train caterwaul against her small clear ebb with the sincere grace to let the pebbles show before she’s ended her domain. I scoop her up in my heart but she is too light and I too heavy to hold her bounty; she is the fierce source of thousand year old blood running through me, giving me the consciousness to behold her trembling naked unabashed form. I am ignominious; I am humbled; I am brittle dry before this Queen of wise force. Her shapes are pure and true; mine awkward and manipulated. I sit at the ledge of this bridge, watching her disappear into the shadow where she tells all of her secrets to no one, and I sing to her. I wail and feel the tumbling mane I wear to protest the short time I’ll have to make love to this river and her cousins. My sounds are caught in thick wind; but she receives my cries like the tears of so many, and carries them along, gaily, earnestly, turning our sounds over and over again inside her into pearls. And another day, all that I come to offer at this advancing night will settle into the bed of her form. And I become the river. The mad woman laughing and howling over the ledge of the bridge at sunset isn’t dying how the people who don’t stop or honk or think passing in cars expect. She’s already more dead alive than she could ever become leaping off into the river.

Bosto Continued...

By the time we arrived in Cambridge the sun was out, and as I watched the Victorians and esteemed brick schoolhouses planted behind plot after generous sidewalk plot of every leaf bearing neighbor extending their pink blossoms over our view of kempt students passing through their days with lugs of volumes stacked into brown leather shoulder bags, I was overcome by the feeling one has in a new place she wishes to know as her own.  My heart rushed to imagine myself as one of those students, or another bus passenger, and perhaps someone standing at a fourth story window worrying about a paper while watching a girl cross the lawn.  I put my face behind the bus driver and imagined how I would smile at an emerging passenger.  The bizarre flavor of this whole trick seems to be the element of my trip that resounds in me; that this happening was casual, natural even.  I didn’t say oh boy, this’ll be fun, getting a sense of life at Harvard by pretending I’m each person I see on my path.  However, this imagining did help me to form an impression of the place so that I could understand how to mesh in, and of course how one might not.  Similar to what we so freely do while watching a movie that promises to take us places otherwise we perhaps would or could not go; we watch the actors on the screen and embody a gangster, a princess, or a child again so as to get a sense of the story and what it wants us to understand as a whole.  Of course, the difference with life being that we’ve got to sew our own meanings together, and the meaning we derive once we’ve stepped off the bus and into the free foot world how we come to be in this world has something to do with how we see and something to do with how others see, all of us ourselves and others.

 

We carried my things to the second floor and placed them in the corner beside the modern black leather sofa set on silver stilts.  I felt like I was back in England or shopping in the section of IKEA that I can’t afford.  The sparse, muted décor was offset by a lone gathering of tulips atop the table in the adjoined kitchen living room expanse.  It wasn’t spotless, but neatly kept, and in the ensuing three days we would trash it with take out, bottles with varying alcoholic contents, high publications, an iron and its board, cheese bits, cigarette butts, and a spattering of a continually disjointed blanket set escaping from a dim-witted, self-impressed, and charmingly deflating air mattress known as my bed. 

After a quick change out of the star printed ill-fitting beater I’d taken on loan from a little sister Stef and I bumbled past the wooden sided homes into Cambridge town center to meet with her boyfriend; the apartment’s permanent resident.  

My Grandmother in Winter (Flash Fiction)

A classic plays on the white TV at the kitchen counter. She faces away because she’s seen this story. In spite of herself she stays beside it; constant sound and electric energy emoted. The bowl she ate soup and crackers from at noon with a pill dries beside the sink over a towel and its picture of a basket filled with wheat. She rests against the worn back of a high kitchen chair watching the snow, water frozen around dirt, rage against the openness. The window is larger than the empty dining room table and outside her friends change by season. The dear, the squirrel, the rare blue jay, the morning doves, the groundhog, and the bees keep watch over my grandmother. Doing her part she tosses ears of corn across the lawn and fills the miniature farmhouse with birdseed. And somehow, at her age, in the summer, she still pulls weeds from the garden. For now, her white Keds dangle above the heating vent in her quiet, clean ranch house. It is winter and she is lonely in her kitchen.