Eight years locked in bed by an accident, his wife’s life an obscene penalty, Peirce Keating was left with only imagination. And little hope, though today might prove different. He loved his wife May, the sea, and bright company. Old pal Gary Mitman was this day’s gift, this day where hope might gain one foothold. That and viewing mirrors he controlled by head movements.
There is only one subject that I could write about for this posting, the heart-breaking news this week of the death of the legend that was Muhammad Ali. Life can be cruel and ironic by reducing a giant to frailty. However, his memory and legacy are as powerful as anything that he ever achieved. His skill, bravery and humanity have all been superbly documented by the world’s press over the last few days.
“Fran,” Beth says, “do you know that tall people do not live as long as short people? It’s a scientific fact, and most likely why basketball has never caught on in Okinawa.”
The first time I heard the cry of the banshee was three days before the full moon. My blood ran cold because I knew exactly what it meant. In my youth, my grandmother entertained us with fantastic fairytales and spooky stories. The haunting tale of the banshee had been one of my favorites, so when I heard the strange keening, I immediately recalled the legend. The story about a witch who announced the imminent death of a loved one was common throughout Ireland. There was even a poem that children sometimes chanted in the schoolyard, often around Halloween:
Have you ever read the future in a thin blue line, as you wait in the handicapped stall in the fourth floor bathroom? Your stretched out knees have made a run in your pantyhose, which are cheap and rough and aggressively tight, so you slide out of your worn kitten heels and tug them off to pass the time. Balling them up and stuffing them into the little maxi-pad trashcan uses up about twenty seconds. Pregnancy test seconds, as any woman in the know will tell you, pass even more slowly than microwave seconds. Whether you are bound to be relieved or disappointed or tremulously hopeful and filled with joy, the waiting is the hardest part. Once you know, you know. You can confront that emphatic little mark and all its implications head on. When you know, you have options. “Options,” you whisper to yourself, hoisting up your skirt with the grooved thumb-grip clamped between your teeth.
Roderick liked the no-nonsense approach of this new psychiatrist. She went to an Ivy League school and she had an aloof air about her. Sexy too…in a frigid, bitchy kind of way. Roderick wondered if her pussy smelled like mothballs or like his grandmother’s old country house. Her office felt like the interior of the space station from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. You could almost hear the air pumping in.
Continue reading “Better Living Through Better Chemistry by Adam Kluger”
“Hello cat! Balancing your arse on the window sill again. You need to lose weight…Pot and kettle…I know!!”
What are you chirping at? Ah, I see, the birds, how ironic!” Someone should have heard that, it was mildly amusing.
“You don’t need to puff up you idiot, I see him. What do you think? Breakdown or directions?”
Continue reading “To Kill John Morgan by Hugh Cron – Adult Content”
I had been at University six months when I got the call to tell me my old school friend Eamon Donovan had died. Drug overdose. He wasn’t the partying kind; it was a different kind of drug overdose. An entirely intentional one. Eamon was from the north of the city, like me; The Bone. That particular stretch of hopeless home-front had given rise to a nasty habit of suicide. In the years I had been out of my working class no-man’s-land I’d stopped counting the amount of associates who had taken the off-ramp. It had become so frequent that it had been dubbed the North Belfast Green Card.
I watch her walking down the middle of the street. She stands tall and defiant against them.
Two minutes have passed since I saw her running out of the entrance to the recently renovated Government Center station, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s crown jewel of glass and stainless steel. I cannot fathom why she fled the relative safety of the underground, to appear here in the bright summer sunlight. To challenge them. To stand directly in harm’s way.
By dusk, he could feel the coming of another sleepless night, so after Helen left for her book club meeting—stooping from the weight of the pregnancy—he left a note on the kitchen counter and walked out the front door. It was a beautiful evening, and maybe that was why he didn’t feel like sleeping. The dying light in the west cast a rusted glow from the horizon, and the air was warm and slow. The only traffic on the road in front of his house was a beat-up brown station wagon gliding past. He watched it disappear up the road, no trees to block his view.
