You are standing atop the highest hill on the island, affording sweeping vistas of the mighty Atlantic Ocean on one side and the gentler waters of Vineyard Sound on the other. An historic clapboard Methodist church stood on this very hill when I bought it, requiring me to hire a teenaged pothead to burn it to the ground in the dead of night.
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What seizes my heart the first time I see The Sensational Sebastian is how he fastens his eyes on me, only me, as he lets go of the trapeze and catapults himself through the air in his emerald suit. A man built for flying.
Read More“I’m scared you’re going to get caught out there. Not paying attention, not stopping for lights. Think of your abduction,” our father said, holding our shoulders as if he’d always feared God. We pulled up our pants and tucked in our skin. “Don’t stop for bleating lights,” he said again. Those lights paint the skin colors that aren’t ours.
We remember this in the backseat. Away from home. We are with friends, in their car full of smoke. Bleat, bleat. We cannot breathe. We are frozen with thoughts of better places to be. The lights pass us by. Everyone but us erupts in human laughter.
Read MoreThe church could hold a thousand people, and was maybe half full. A couple of dozen were family members of the five brides and five grooms; the others were there to witness the experiment.
Read MoreBefore I turn over the ignition, I slide my arms forward until my hands touch the inside of the windshield. I flick the back of my fingers against the glass and hear the click of my nails. I don’t know why; it’s something my father used to do when he drove. Something about luck. Like the way he spit on a fishhook or bait before casting out.
Read MoreIn the far corner of the desert, south of the Barry Goldwater Air Force Base, deep in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, eleven miles from the border, they found a Bible, a tube of lip balm, and a set of footprints. This wasn’t what they were looking for.
Read MoreIf you have grown up with lack, you will act like Enyinne, who has become an expert in carrying her grief with her so light it doesn’t show to the world. Those years of bread so stale its prices are reduced because it smells like paper and tastes like dust, but that’s all her mother can afford. Those years of wearing slippers for so long they thin out and the heat from the asphalt burns her soles. Those years of washing and wadding up rags to use again, because where does she expect the money for a sanitary pad to fall from? The sky?
Read MoreWe pretended to know the answers and kept our fingers crossed, sometimes behind our backs. We ignored it when we knew you were up to something. We debated politics. We got pissed when you didn’t fill up the gas tank.
Read MoreYou settle on Hemingway’s salted foreskin. The relic resembles a strip of tree bark. It’s hard to believe it ever hooded Hemingway. The peddler winks at your shrewdness and even quotes a line from The Old Man and the Sea, something about the difference between destruction and defeat.
Read More“Well, you in or you out?” Blonde asked me the day it started, meaning: was I going to teeth cigarettes with them or not? Meaning, was I a boy or something worse?
I’d been showing a customer a factory-rusted hubcap, shoveled out in the middle so one could use it as a picture frame. Most of my workdays consist of convincing customers that art doesn’t have to be beautiful, it just has to make a statement.
I started to apologize to the customer before stopping dead, looking toward Blonde, shoving the hubcap at the lady and turning my back in a way to mean I was done helping her. The tails of my apron hit the clenched muscles in my stomach as I swung around.
“You know—”
“I know you’re a girl,” Blonde cut me off, rolled his eyes. “That’s just, like, accepted fact. What I’m saying is are you maximizing profit with us or not? Cooper quit for Hobby Lobby and we need warm bodies.”
Read MoreJust after my thirteenth birthday I killed a mailman. It was an accident as much as anything is an accident. There were no weapons and I never planned it and feel bad about it still, but it happened, and I watched it happen, and after it happened it seemed like something I would always be waiting to have happen again.
Read MoreHe asks if I’m a poet, and I say no, I’m just a Pisces. He nods, unimpressed, and jots in the open file on his lap. The line is obscure, and that is the point. I am using all that I’ve read for screening purposes.
The social worker reaches into the business-looking bag by his chair and produces a bunch of tiny papers. I flinch at the sight of them. Sticky notes. These were found in your backpack, the social worker says, placing the pile before me. He waits, blinking, so that I might explain.
Read MoreThe man dragged out the dummy panda again and put it in the middle of the yard. It was well oiled and for a few moments my body was readying even though I was like—no, intestinal vapors, do not rise and do not go to your battle stations, no no no—but then the grease globbed off, all melted in the sun and runny. This must be this dummy’s definition of romance, I thought, though I don’t think a real bear could control its thing if it wanted to because, well I don’t know. And I laughed, because I thought it was funny, though it was a little serious, too. I say serious because of the dummies.
Read MoreIs she good? And I don’t mean versus bad, but is she better? Does she do all the things? Does she part for you? Does she? Do you prefer part or spread? Does she spread? It’s okay if she does, because you know that I know, so it’s okay now.
Read MoreI made a bit of a joke about it. “Beautiful country over there,” which was my way of seeing if he was telling the truth. Because, when you’re talking one veteran to another, you never say, “What a shithole that place was,” or “I hate that fucking place.” You say, “Beautiful country.” “Real vacationland.”
Read MoreI’m not here to have opinions
I keep thinking, Rib-eye steaks, and what do you know? Lil’ Spanky actually comes by. “Just Billy now,” he tells us, shaking Thomas’s hand. “But look at this! Big boss right here!” he says.
Thomas shrugs. He’s in a rayon shirt and cuffed slacks he ordered from a back-alley tailor in Little Saigon.
Billy’s still holding Thomas’s hand as he says to me, “Back in the day this fool was at a Motel 6! Running fingers through the carpet for rocks!”
“Yeah,” I say. “That probably explains a lot.”
Read MoreEvery couple of months, the seller arrived unannounced to pick up something he had left behind: a wall phone in the den, canoe mounts in the shed. The buyer allowed him to take what he wanted, then asked him for help with a difficult chore.
Read MoreA man told me once that there’s more nuclear waste roaming the highways than there is in underground storage. He said they can’t keep it in one spot for too long. (I did not ask who “they” were.) I merely nodded at this possible lie. I found the story too romantic to want to challenge it.
Read MoreI asked her death angel, whom I could barely see that day, why. Why the savagery. She had been, on balance, a good person. Selfish at times, deceptive even. But on balance, I mean. The indistinct angel might have shrugged, I couldn’t be sure.
Read MoreThe fence won’t be a deterrent for Liam; even with his skateboard, he’s a climber, and he’s not one to fear consequence or retribution. He has grown up in a trailer with his dad and his sister, the trailer park a tiny communal netherworld separated from the Kansas college town’s outer ring of student housing by a block of untapped woods that will soon be purchased and plowed and built on. For now, big fighting dogs roam unchallenged.
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