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Fiction
Man Standing Under A Rocket Taking Off For The Moon
The lump slowly vaporizes, the chamber tumbles with smoke, and I breathe it in and hit the vault of heaven. I pass the pipe around and watch their expressions change. They lean down like winged monkeys ladling up love from a boiling glass ball.
April 1997Poof
Jayne, my hairdresser, has just had her eyebrows tattooed. Two black scabs arch across her forehead. “I don’t dare frown,” she says, “or they might bleed. But, oh, when the scabs fall off, my eyebrows will be deep gold, to match my new hair. And even when I go swimming, I won’t lose my face.”
March 1997The Vomitorium
We were standing at the edge of the blacktop at Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Grade School, as far away from the recess monitor as we could get. It was 1978, and we were in eighth grade — though Ralph would have been in high school already if he hadn’t failed both the third and the fifth grades.
March 1997Green-Eyed Dog
I am nineteen, a pale pimply suburbanite so thin my knees and elbows knife through my clothes. I have learned almost everything I know from television and Time magazine. I was once afraid of the world, worldophobic, but down here if you show your fear you will be eaten alive.
February 1997Miles of Promise
Everything is packed in the rented car and we are about to drive off when my mother sucks in her breath and says, “Your father!” She gets out of the car, runs into the house, and returns with the baroque-looking urn that was left out on the dining-room table like airplane tickets so she wouldn’t forget it.
January 1997Motion Sickness
My wrist grows warm and creaks, aches like an arthritic’s. My forehead’s pressed against his “treasure trail” — that’s what we called the line of hair on a boy’s stomach in high school; giggling, we watched the shirtless boys run back and forth, chasing a ball. When their bellies began to glisten, we grew quiet, afraid to speak our minds. I’m sweating now, with my head smushed against him. I lick him with my wilted tongue.
January 1997Last Day At Lemon Acres
At 4:30 that afternoon Jack was sitting up in a chair, his polished, old man’s legs crossed, eyes staring intently at the floor. My heart turned a little pirouette: it was the first time he’d been out of bed on his own in six weeks.
December 1996The Enemy
I haven’t lived well because I didn’t know until recently who the enemy was. I thought the enemy was outside, somewhere far removed from me — the communists, the Serbs, the Muslims. I didn’t know that the true enemy was much closer at hand.
December 1996Fire-Walking
Wayne had proposed marriage, and she had told him she wasn’t sure she wanted to be married right now. Actually, all she wanted was a long, hot shower. She wondered how this man could ever have made her think her heart had opened as never before. It was becoming something of an ordeal just to be polite.
November 1996Phone Sex And World Peace
The man she loves might become a monk. He is up at an Ivy League divinity school studying Saint Benedict and looking forward to spending a week of his winter vacation at a monastery. She was hoping they could go to LA, but that was before he dumped her.
November 1996
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