I asked her if she was from Russia. She said “Ukraine,” but I was too embarrassed to ask if that was in Russia so I just nodded.
She hand-washed my blouses, and I loved her for that. I wanted to share the five habits of healthy living with her, but I didn’t know her well enough at the time.
· Never eat anything bigger than your head
· Stay away from dairy
· Drink lots of water and always add a flavor packet
· Don’t eat the things you want the most
· Train for a full marathon
The ice will wake you. You’ll hear it dropping in the plastic cup, sense it being passed in front of you to the woman in the window seat you haven’t spoken to since the flight began. You’ll drift, then you’ll open your eyes and stare into a face that would be prettier with less make-up. Her strip-light smile won’t fade as she asks you, patiently, for the third time if you’d like something to drink. You’ll order a gin and tonic even though you don’t want one because that’s what you do on flights. While she rummages for the gin needle in the haystack of unwanted brandy you’ll wonder if you’ll get peanuts or mini pretzels.
You’ll bet on pretzels.
And you’ll be right.
Atop a hill in the moors sits an old man, wrapped in his beloved waterproof. It’s red with black buttons, and only some of them are missing. He sits on a carefully laid blanket, an empty space beside him, and sips from his Thermos. His gaze never shifts from the sister hill opposite him. In the drizzle and the fog, he is waiting for the ghost.
The air is cold and the sky is free to bloom with the tiny flourishes of long forgotten light. Next to the old man is another flask, untouched. He pats the blanket, gives it a tender little rub, and says:
‘She’ll be here soon, just you wait.’
I catch the sunrise over the bridge every morning before I sit down by the subway. It’s not because I particularly enjoy sunrises or because I somehow find comfort in them. It’s just on my way. That’s it. I live on the other side of the bridge and since most workers get up early, I also have to get up early. I try to hurry over. For some reason it’s easier to imagine us without a home. It’s within the very term homeless. It does happen that someone recognizes me and when they do, they’ll never again share a few coins. The magic is gone. I’m no longer just that homeless man who sits there waiting for them when they go to work, and still waits for them when they go home.
Continue reading “Homes, Brothers and Fantasies by Tobias Haglund”
Hawaii is known for its near perfect weather, but a new report from the University of Hawaii’s Sea Grant program states that islands in the Pacific might be unrecognizable in the coming years as climate change makes them hotter, arid, stormy and even disease-ridden.
Huffington Post 8/28/2014
Experts have found very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.
Nuclear Emergency Tracking Centre
Sometimes, when it’s quiet, I am flooded with painful memories of what my life was like before moving to Poplar Hills. I remember especially the sounds of quiet: crows quarreling in the trees, the drone of bees, the occasional concert by a mockingbird. These were the sounds of peace. And they are absent from Poplar Hills, although I search for them often.
Analogy, an-al’e-ji, n. an agreement or correspondence in certain respects between things otherwise different. [Gr. analogia – ana, according to, and logos, ratio.]
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We all wonder whether our dreams have anything to tell us. At the same time there’s nothing so dull as hearing about someone else’s dreams. We all frequently wake up perplexed or even distressed by what has been going on in our minds whilst in the realm of Hypnos. My friend Harrison told me the strangest story, that concerns dreaming, saying that it was the most disturbing case he had come across in his profession, yet at the same time the most up-lifting.
The room felt cold, the curtains around each bed swaying slightly in a draft that seemed to come from nowhere. Dennis walked down the centre aisle, the soles of his work boots sucking at the floor. He stopped at his mother’s bed, stood at the end of it, waiting.
His mother eventually opened her eyes, the act seeming to take some effort. The skin of her face was slack and grey, seeming to have shrunk since the last time he visited. ‘Dennis…’
The door was unlocked and he was taken into the room.
“We’re right outside if you need us Doc!”
The two guards watched as he sat and then they left.
Mount Carmel Road was a quiet dead-end in the north of town. In the middle of the night when the war in the Far East was over and the radios blared the news, all lights went on in all the houses on that blind street, except where the card game was played. Many of the neighbors were solidly indignant about that turn of events on VJ Night, two Mount Carmel boys would not be coming back from the mad Pacific, which most of us only saw in Saturday newsreels at the theater.
This house was a dark house on a dark street in my town that, with some lesions and scars, hangs on to a place in my memory and will not let go. Tenants and landlords hardly leave scribed notations of a dwelling, thinking all things will ferment, dissipate, and eventually pass on. Fifty years or more of recall usually get dulled, terribly pockmarked, or fade into the twilight the way one ages, dimming of the eyes, bending of the knees, slow turns at mortality. But this one rides endlessly in place, a benchmark, a mooring place. It resides as a point of time, a small moment of history colored up by characterization of one incident.
literally stories 