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Fiction
What Do You Need?
In Tibetan the word for “heart” and “mind” is the same because it is believed that the mind is located in the heart, not the brain, where we Westerners place it. It was a notion I quite liked but didn’t know what to do with on a daily operating basis that summer.
December 2010
Let Us Rejoice And Be Glad
And later, years from now, my brother Ed will say, Remember that Thanksgiving? Everything was perfect. He will be referring to this Thanksgiving, with its car accidents and nursing homes and cemeteries and families and turkey and mashed potatoes — like the batch in the styrofoam container that will be discovered in the far back reaches of the fridge near Christmas, a little green and very dry.
November 2010
Telling Him
I wanted to ask how many Pall Malls he was smoking a day. Had he finally switched to filters? Instead I took a shaky breath and said, “I’m gay. I’ve always been gay. My boyfriend’s name is Steven, and we’ve been together for five years. I know you think being gay is a choice, but it isn’t. It isn’t a choice at all.”
October 2010
The Stew
She began cooking the stew at 5:41 A.M. on Thursday. Somewhere in the night her husband had, as was his habit, moved to the middle of the bed, and she’d found herself precariously perched between his chest and the edge of the mattress, the inhabitant of an inconsequential strip of bedding that had, over the past few years, become her home.
October 2010
Aglaglagl
He has been making inferences, figuring out what it is to be. He invents a language that expresses his awareness. His sentences are marvelously efficient, each one containing a whole chapter of his philosophy. “Aglaglagl” is one. He says it when the dog’s nose comes to visit the bassinet.
October 2010The Clothes He Wore
Normally I wouldn’t have found them, because I am an exceptionally lazy housekeeper. Or maybe I’m not so much lazy as inept. I discovered in my teens that if you didn’t know how to do housework, you wouldn’t have to do it, and now that I’m living on my own and have to do it, I don’t know how. Anyway, one summer morning I had the day off. I woke up, saw my messy flat as if for the first time, and got a shock.
September 2010
The World In Red
Floreta Cook buried her husband, Cookie, in the Questa Cemetery in New Mexico. It was a good cemetery. Cookie had always admired it. He liked the sign on the gate saying to watch out for snakes, and the cemetery grounds were bright with wreaths and saints. Cookie had believed in all the saints and gods and had seen patterns everywhere. To Floreta life was chaos, apocalypse probably just around the corner.
September 2010
Nothing To Do With Me
One morning over breakfast my girlfriend, Milana, told me about an old boyfriend of hers who had self-published a chapbook of haiku. Peripheries, he’d called it. He carried dozens of copies around with him in a hemp shoulder bag and sometimes read his poems at open mikes and on street corners.
August 2010
Red Ribbon Monday
The phone rang just after Felonise had hung up the white clothes in the backyard. It was late October, and the laundry swayed in the California wind that blew hot and gentle from the moment the sun came up out here in the orange groves outside Rio Seco: the dish towels, the sheets from the fold-out couch where her grandson Teeter had spent the night when his brother, Lafayette, went to a piano concert, and the white socks her daughter Cerise called “Peds,” the ones Felonise liked to wear at night around the house. Could wash them after one night. Cleaner than slippers.
August 2010
At Prayer Level
“Perpetual care,” Mama emphasized. “No weeds growing over you or your loved ones when there’s nobody left to weed. (This was a comment on the fact that none of us had given her any grandchildren — no grave-weeders in her future, or “perpetuity,” as she was now calling it. Perpetuity was a concept Mama had latched onto like a snapping turtle.)
July 2010
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