My son Jamie brought me to all my treatments at the hospital in Danvers, a 7-minute drive for him as he says for more than three years (I am loaded with many ailments of various kinds) and I always noticed a lady who brought her father for his appointments, but dressed as though she was going to a ball, a fancy dress, and a marvelous pair of legs that could dance her across Broadway in her day, being the knockout she was, and carried yet a boatload of her beauty into a few years of time.
Gramercy Tavern has been a New York City staple since the early nineties. With a spacious bar and wonderful food it has set the gold standard for what casual, fine dinning should be. The restaurant is more formal than the bar but the bar food is just as delicious. Although… the pace in the dining room is different, with the kitchen and the patrons performing a type of Kabuki Theater. The waitstaff, with just the right amount of reverence to the kitchen, serves exquisite dishes to a discerning clientele and in return that clientele pairs each course with the absolute best wine, hand selected by the Sommelier on duty. You ask for their opinion out of respect for the food and they never disappoint. And in the end all pay homage to the shrine of Meyer/Anthony. The only problem with the dining room? There is always a second seating and no matter how well you behave, eventually you will need to leave.
Charlie felt her stomach sink to her toes as she pressed her trembling finger against the weathered doorbell. It was 2 a.m. His shades were drawn. Maybe he was asleep. Please, God, let him be asleep. She clutched his novel to her chest, smothering the cover reading ‘Melting Hearts’. Such a stupid, sappy title for a Molotov cocktail. She hadn’t even remembered to put on shoes when she grabbed her keys and fled. The fire of rage roaring in her chest during the drive over had smoldered into ash the moment she’d unbuckled her seatbelt. Now, she cowered barefoot on his shadowed stoop, gasping as the hall light flicked to life and the door before her creaked open.
On Saturday night, Leon and his friend Max “The Rhythm Wonders,” played guitar and sang at Tom Kosk’s stag party. Tom was engaged to Samantha Ciaccia, the wedding scheduled in one week. He was already living with her, in a double wide trailer in the bush under Mount Baldy.
A ring of strawberry lipstick circles the smoothed edge of the blunt as she passes it to me, and I try, I really do, not to imagine what it would be like to kiss her—to taste the berry directly from her lips instead of getting my hit secondhand from this pineapple flavored cigarillo wrapper.
It was the second day of our trip to Madrid. We were in a restaurant not far from Plaza Mayor with the massive stone walls whispering the secrets they knew, trying to eavesdrop on ours. We had almost finished the bottle of Cava, I was a little dizzy from the alcohol and too high on you, my friend. You watched me with those magnet eyes of yours, a wicked smile played on your lips, and I was asking myself if you’re even real.
The skirl of Citizens Arrest fills the stairwell of my walk-up. The electric guitar twangs and pulses through the walls; my key chain vibrates in the door lock, sending judders up my arm, rattling my teeth. I thump on my neighbor’s wall.
I’m in our living room and the sun is hitting the couch in your spot just how you liked it. I always wanted to close the curtains so it wouldn’t fade the fabric, but today I leave them open, like you would’ve wanted. I suppose I’m daydreaming again because I swear I hear your voice. But when I turn to look at you, your spot is still empty.
With a peaked roof topped by a small brass eagle, the “Caretaker’s Cottage” in New Town Cemetery is a seven-by-nine rectangle that stands long side up. A few years back the City of Charleston had money left over in the Parks Department budget; two thousand dollars was allotted for the creation of ten incomprehensibly cheap signs to mark various “historical sites” throughout town. It was one of those mystifying expenditures that governments make to discourage the expectation of competence. One of the signs stands in front of the rectangle. It says: “Former Caretaker’s Cottage.”
Outside being the ancestral home to untold generations of Grey Squirrels, the building is a tool shed added decades after the cemetery was founded in 1902. New Town did have a live-in caretaker once, but he dwelled in a long since razed house that stood at the foot of the hill in which the cemetery is seated. But the extremely typical Charleston city employee tasked with the sign job had to put something on the one set aside for the cemetery–so she pulled a fiction from where the sun never rises and literally engaged a sign maker (her fiance–who reaped a thousand percent profit). In fact, nine of the ten signs placed throughout Charleston are similarly procured fictions–with the other being only true about Hartsville, Tennessee–the boyfriend sign maker’s hometown.
literally stories 