I always find her this one way, it seems: sitting on her bed, high on her knees yet hunched at the shoulders as she bends into her project of the day and fixes it with her hard, Catholic glare. She has been known to work up a sweat, just hunching and glaring. Peeking at her through the door-crack, I try to imagine what kind of exertion roasts her so from the inside out, but apparently, it is something not I nor the world can see.
I pulled into the parking lot and chose a spot near the rear door where a stencilled sign on the window read Eee-Zee-Sudz-It 24 ho rs. Very funny. Not.
The window is half open. Pleasant Fruge can taste rain. His tongue is a tuning fork for weather. Footsteps send a flowery signal. Their echo bounces against monastery walls, but the old monk doesn’t hear. Dreams grow thick in him.
Some see the aging face as an ongoing story; others see it as a palimpsest from which the original pretty story has been scraped and is continuously replaced by increasingly derivative tales culled from the same source. Here, I find myself thinking Hamlet compared to Hamlet Versus Predator: To Bleed or Not to Bleed. Sadly, as you may plainly see, no metaphor holds up after you have looked at it long enough.
Word of Bisbee’s Dad’s funeral got passed around through friends via emails.
Good ol’ Bisbee.
Stanley Schlumperdink thought to himself of the times that he and the Diabolical Bis would hit on chicks together at Trader Vic’s at The Plaza in High School. Bisbee preferred the Tiki Puka Puka to the Spider Bowls. Either way. The girls back then had candy flavored pussies and a real love of high fashion.
Olivia and her boyfriend broke up on a Sunday morning. It wasn’t a surprise, really. Olivia had offered her boyfriend an amicable break up twice before by yelling, “Do you just want to split up?” two times. Although he had asked to stay together then, he had behaved otherwise by disappearing for hours and returning drunk without any explanation. As a last attempt at repair, Olivia had called his parents for help. His father had assured her that he would force his “idiot son” to propose if he only could.
Our house has no windows. On winter mornings, I leave in downpours and darkness at six, then return in the brooding grey of twilight. Sometimes your car is here and sometimes it’s not. On the evenings when you’re around we eat supper in silence, chewing food without flavour. I’m never hungry any more, either. We scrape more food into the dustbin than either of us eat. You take to the sofa behind the barrier of your phone, tapping out messages to whoever. I take the armchair and read books I’ve read before.
Lydia was late home, she had delayed as long as possible but now it had to be faced. She threw her keys into the old bowl on the hall table and climbed the stairs. Cuthbert had stepped out of the shower moments before.
As she stood in the dark of the landing she watched him stroll from the bathroom, his pale arse glowing in the borrowed light from the bedroom. She found it hard to believe that she used to find that particular part of his anatomy attractive. She had stroked it, patted it and on occasion she had kissed it.
The key to a good night’s sleep was a cold room and a lot of blankets.
It was 61 degrees inside and there were four on his bed at the moment, but none of them were in the right spots, yet.
Continue reading “Two is the loneliest number by Aaron Kaplan”
Breslin was dead now. Undeniably so. All you had to do was go back and read some of the old columns to see the talent and anger and originality. He was just another one who had made his mark and moved on.
Continue reading “What would Breslin have thought? by Adam Kluger”
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