“I was never in the Boy Scouts,” I lied. It seemed the wiser course in the job interview than to have the possible employer learn I had been asked to leave Pack 22 after telling the Scoutmaster what he could do with the rope he was using to teach knot tying.
Willard got a call back. He was surprised, his knees shook, and his voice trembled, but they must have seen something. The only thing he could think of was they must have thought his nervousness was a character choice instead of him. He told Flo about it, and she shook her head. He auditioned in the banquet room at the E.F. Lane Hotel in Keene for Foster and Lewis, two producers from Concord, who were casting a play called I Did It for Love, a three-act comedy around same-sex marriage. The stage manager was named Leon, and he came into the supermarket where Willard worked, and told him about the call back.
Jock’s folding his pyjamas back under his pillow when he hears it. A low, growling hiss. His twin daughters are elsewhere, probably playing in the walls, so it’s just him and the mannequin dressed as his wife in the bedroom. He’s searching for the source of the noise when the duvet shifts on the bed. It’s a slight movement, like wind-ruffled marram grass, but it’s something. Carefully, he pulls back the covers, revealing the green and yellow-chevroned scales of a king cobra.
I bought a Dracula painting at the Thrift store yesterday. The clerk looked at me with contemptuous eyes as she scanned the price ticket. I thought I heard her whisper “That gothic child just wasted his money” as I walked towards the door.
As I walk from the metro station to work one Monday morning, I see a guy at the curb, watching the traffic and sweeping his arms as if conducting an orchestra. He wears a bright red sweater, dress slacks, and wing-tip shoes. But everything’s dirty, and the sweater is far too big for him. He also needs a shave and has greasy gray hair. As I walk past him wondering if I’m going to notice an odor, he glances at me and crinkles his nose.
Continue reading “The Maestro in the Baggy, Red Sweater by David Henson”
The last time I saw M. Renoir, he was sitting beneath an umbrella at a sidewalk cafe in Paris, leisurely drinking coffee and glancing through a newspaper. M. Renoir, every inch the French gentleman with closely trimmed mustache and beard–gray streaking at his temples–was usually impeccably dressed, his hat and cane placed casually upon the seat of an adjacent chair. I say “usually” since, on this occasion, he appeared not altogether unlike a much poorer and less refined version of himself. I was, I confess it, rather taken aback at his appearance.
Continue reading “The Vanishing of M. Renoir by R.L.M. Cooper”
Raine was in the next town when the accident happened. She pulled over at the roadblock where a man in uniform with a very big gun said, “There’s been an accident at the plant, Mam. Evacuation underway. You can’t pass.”
Some days bring sunshine. Some bring rain. And somewhere along the line life settles in hard as a February sky. Locks down your dreams tight against the iron earth and dares you to object. For such a short month it exacts a long toll.
A bunch of scientists did an experiment once with fleas. They took half a dozen of the brightest and bounciest, dropped them in a jar and screwed on the lid. For a couple of days those fleas launched themselves into almost continually. Eventually, through pain or weariness or both, they stopped jumping so high. They settled on a spot two thirds of the way up the sides of the jar and that was their limit. Even after the lid came off and they could have bounded their way to freedom those fleas kept right on jumping to a place well below the potential of possibility.
Maybe I’m being melodramatic but if that leaden February sky ever clears I wonder how high I can still jump.
Post 141 is upon us. It is here and now and hip and happening!!
The last time I was hip and happening was, well, never!
This may be a weird mix of ideas this week.
For some reason I was thinking of fashion and how fucked up that is. It’s an industry within an industry which has evolved incestuously. Most of the pipe-cleaners who model look as if they need a bloody good feed.
I used the line that I was bulimic but I just kept forgetting to be sick on many occasions. I think a lot of the models are anorexic and they keep forgetting to eat. They must be on some sort of dust diet.
The only reason that I thought of this was when I put on my new Bakers Whites for the first time and I realised that due to my stature I looked like an avalanche. The only good thing about this is that a big hairy dug keeps bringing me brandy. For some reason they are all called Bernard.
Continue reading “Week 141 – Fashion, Bulimia And Elvis Is Dead.”
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