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Sunbeams

The Middle Ages hangs over history’s belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size forty-eight shorts forever.

Tom Robbins

Dreams Of The Old Green Man

I was hiding in the bushes one Sunday afternoon when Sucker Boy came running through our courtyard holding up a giant bag of multicolored suckers. This was at the Bellview Apartments, a massive low-income complex that took up half a mile along University Avenue in San Diego, California. Sucker Boy had a long, twisting, whip-snapping line of admirers trotting after him, glossy-lipped Pied Piper children with suckers in their eyes. He was a damp, plump boy with a pinched pastry face and a treacherous smile. He was two years older than me, a second-grader. I never learned his real name. This was about eight minutes before he died.

Winter Was The Season

I don’t like saying goodbye to the people I’ve worked with at The Sun — not after we’ve spent years together drinking too much coffee and meeting impossible deadlines and struggling to make the magazine better and trying to be better people ourselves. But sooner or later they leave. A spouse gets a job offer in another city, or graduate school beckons, or it’s simply time to move on. We promise to keep in touch, and often we do. So it’s goodbye, but not really goodbye.

Fears Of Your Life

Michael B. Loggins spends his days writing, drawing, and painting at Creativity Explored, a government-funded art center in San Francisco’s Mission District. The center hires developmentally disabled adults to create art and often publishes their work in the independent magazine Whipper Snapper Nerd. Publicity from the xeroxed-and-stapled publication has resulted in gallery exhibits in San Francisco, New York City, and Los Angeles.

Panic

A hundred benzodiazopines, a man in a red ski mask with a long knife, a small hole in a blanket

Dr. Harris’s Residence

I remember being alone with my father only a few times. That person, a man, my father, was the tallest human. His hair was black, and darkness covered him in long, smooth suits, which now I recognize as beautifully tailored.

Before The Fall, The Fullness

My son Josh once wrote me a letter in which he described hiking alone in the mountains of Ecuador, fourteen thousand feet above sea level. The tiny lights of a village shone below him, and the snowcapped cone of a volcano was visible in the distance. “The stars and planets are incredibly low, large, and brilliant here,” he wrote. The tone of his letter was ecstatic, like Sufi poetry — love and immanence spiced with joy.

Falling Into Life

Over the past five years, as I have moved into the solidity of middle age, I have become aware of a surprising need for symmetry. I am possessed by a peculiar passion: I want to believe that my life will balance out. And because I once had to learn to fall in order to keep this life mine, I now seem to have convinced myself that I must also learn to fall into death.

A Dog Named Hopi

I tried to tell myself that he only wanted to rape me. I thought of all the women down through the ages who had been raped and silently asked for their help. I asked their spirits to hover over us and lighten the dark corners of this man’s mind.

Neighbors

Ordinarily, Marko Sakic walked the five blocks to work at his grocery store on the Street of Proletarian Brigades in Nizograd, Croatia, but these days he drove, because he didn’t want to face his neighbors in the streets. Croatia had recently declared its independence from Serb-ruled Yugoslavia, and, as a Serb, Marko didn’t know what this meant for him. He wanted to be inconspicuous.