January 2012
1 post
2 tags
watching boy
They say there are three rules to good stargazing. Or tips, rather: dark skies, dark skies, and dark skies. And that’s why he is here, on top of a mountain, where the yellowy glow of streetlights and storefronts cannot reach. Here there are always dark skies, and tonight the clouds cover only the moon, leaving a dark theater of stars glowing in the blackness like punched out holes between him and...
November 2011
4 posts
2 tags
the greatest
Once I wanted to be the greatest, sang the radio.
It was starting to rain. At the barely-cracked tops of the car windows the smell of lightning breezed inside. It was a good feeling. She didn’t turn the wipers on just yet, okay to watch the drops slap and stick and slip away in the driving wind.
And then came the rush of the flood, stars of night turned deep to dust, she sang along.
The modern...
2 tags
at the beach
“Is he dead?”
Mr. Torrey lay wrinkled into his faded towel. Dead?
He would have reached out his hand to assure the little girl of his life force, but feared it was too skeletal to be convincing. He thought of his own daughters, the little darlings, once sunny-eyed faeries, now weathered, weary mothers with girls of their own.
I should be dead, he whispered, but his voice was caught...
2 tags
the darlings
Mr. Darling was leaning back and closing his eyes. “She was wearing a poodle skirt, I think.”
“I was not!”
“You were. All of your friends were wearing them that day. To be funny.”
“Oh! And a ribbon, in my hair!”
Darby loved poodle skirts, probably. He put all the girls he had ever loved in a poodle skirt and sighed. His nail was coming off in pieces at the champing of his teeth and the...
2 tags
a city tree
They watched him watch the window.
“What’s he looking at?”
“I don’t know. The city.”
They could see him resting his chin on the windowsill and whispering into his long fingers.
“The city? He’s never seen the city.”
“Exactly.”
He was counting buildings. They stood tall and gray and quiet as far as he could see. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten, he breathed, and closed his...
October 2011
5 posts
2 tags
Susan cut the card
long ways, across the numbers. She tried to cut them in half. She didn’t want someone to piece it back together and go on a spending spree. But there wasn’t anything left on this one anyway. She cut the other way now and reduced the card to little bits of plastic confetti. There was a little computer chip in this one too, and it fell apart at her scissors, crunchy tiny bits of metal and who knows...
2 tags
Pat lay quiet in the still dark
He could make out strange shapes in the fuzzy blackness: the old pipe radiator looking melted to the wall, shifting drapes, the clutter of books and trinkets and papers. His right hand was trembling again, fluttering ever so slightly. The doctors couldn’t tell if anything was wrong or not. But he could tell. He held his hand to his head and felt the blood pumping through his palms. It was...
3 tags
He fancied himself a poet.
With broad strokes, he fit line after line to the pages of his small notebook, counting the rhythms under his breath. He didn’t think about it too much. If there was a tree set just so against the sky, or a moon grinning sideways over a mountain, or a bright flower purposively placed, he would tell its story. He didn’t bother to show anyone. He knew what it was like to read other’s writing, when...
2 tags
She would be marrying any moment now.
A moment before that moment, she would be free as a bird, unhitched and unclaimed. Then the moment—a ring, a kiss, an official declaration. And then the moment after, lost to all other men, she would be jealously guarded, prettily distant, mapped and properly documented, with a certificate and everything. All in just a few moments, just past Exit 221.
He thought of how she would think of him in...
2 tags
She liked him because he was tall.
It wasn’t, for instance, the way he held her hands, firm and cold. It wasn’t the way he spoke to her, like a child. It wasn’t even the way he opened every door for her, even the refrigerator door. He was, however, wonderfully tall. His legs loomed over her like columns, a doric belt buckle adorned by fingertips. After a short time, she became acquainted with the perfect way he shaded her vision,...
September 2011
4 posts
2 tags
I miss you in that normal way,
like when you need to sleep but you can’t. You turn over in bed, you turn over your pillow to the cool side, but you’re still awake. The ringing in your ears. I’m sorry if this is too much for you to hear.
When we met I was sure everyone was in love with you, with your very serious way and your very serious ideas. You were going to save the world before you weren’t twenty anymore and everyone...
2 tags
Death can be sweet, he said.
Like blackberry jam.
I met him somewhere between where you are and where I am. It was dark, the stars stark and sudden, our breath colored with cold. Or maybe it was day, bright in the park, the grasses scurrying under our feet, joggers moving along the spider web of sidewalks. He does not look like they say, neither skeletal nor hooded, neither scythe-wielding nor ominously tall. More like Joe...
2 tags
She slept on the dark side of the moon.
She slumbered in an unearthly silence: no violin of crickets, no howling of the neighbor’s baby, no wind stirring at the windows. She curled under her favorite molehill of moon, the dust rising and settling with her breath in low gravity. From earth, with a powerful telescope, you might see her as a small hair in the ear of old man moon, nothing more. He moved his camp every 29 and a half days to...
2 tags
Once upon a time,
a man wandered in the woods. This aspen forest hugged Saginaw Bay, a foggy drop of Michigan magic north of Detroit a hundred miles. I mention Detroit because people think Michigan is Detroit. But I am here to tell you that there is much more to Michigan than Detroit’s dirty streets and limo drivers. You should know, however, that this wandering man was a Detroit man. I use the term “man” with some...
August 2011
2 posts
2 tags
When henry was inducted into the circle of...
he found many fellow sufferers. The milkman, with his native cheery temperament, had fallen in love with the lady on 193 Leaf Avenue, just a few blocks from him. He had left her pink milk on Valentine’s day but she had left it on the porch. The paper boy, targetless bundles of fine print heralding from his wire rimmed basket, had loved the impossibly freckled girl in the neighboring cul-de-sac....
2 tags
I am a rock,
goes the song. I am an island. There is a palm tree of a lamp in my hand and I’m bracing against the waves of sheets, bracing against the dark. It’s so quiet I can hear the lapping of the books, tumbled from my bookshelf like paper doves. Somewhere in this madness is my square glass phone, reflecting a cut of moonlight from between my ill-fitting drapes. When I close my eyes I see it startle to...