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”
They recognise each other immediately. At least they think they do – greeting each other with the kind of embrace usually reserved for a reunion, which in many ways this feels like. A few nervous moments pass as they silently try to categorise the person opposite. They both wear name badges and so have no need for formal introductions. They look each other up and down – something normally considered impolite but here it feels acceptable, as though they are merely old acquaintances catching up after a long absence. They share a few jokes about their current predicament, serving as pleasantries before concluding what the other has already concluded.
Part 1
A few years ago – actually a few more than a few – I was ever so close to becoming a full-fledged drone in the beehive of modern-day America. During that time, I was still merely an apprentice — one of many youthful human resource units at the disposal of a large and powerful Wall Street corporation. My job was to sit at a desk ten hours a day and do various unimportant things. In return, I received money. Not that much of it, but just enough so that I didn’t have to worry constantly about how much I was spending. Forty thousand a year, let’s call it, though it was probably only thirty-eight at best.
Watching every move about the campfire, studying each face lit up by the flickering flames, the fiddler Sam Plumbeck idly held onto his instrument, waiting for the proper moment. Time, he could feel, was pressing down on him; it had different parts that moved in different ways. The stars all the way to the horizon dip were many and miraculous, the horses silent for the most part even though a coyote cry filtered in now and then, and the darkness beyond wrapped them like a giant robe spread under those stars. He had ridden in, apparently aimlessly to all the trail hands, and joined up with them on their way back to their ranch, the promise of music being hailed by all the hands who had delivered the herd, were through with the drive. He alone, out of all these trail hands who had hit the jackpot, knew what was coming down on them. Nothing is supposed to be perfect or fair; at least this side of heaven, or the mass of a blue sky, or the dash of sunlight on a rainy day. And he, just a picker of strings, with not a coin of the gold in the lot having his name on it, could only wait it all out, hoping for the best and only seeing the worst coming up.
It started right after college graduation when I ate my degree. I spent four years working on my bachelors. In a second I had devoured it whole. Okay, maybe not whole. I took the diploma back to my dorm room, climbed under the covers, and with a fork and knife, cut up the piece of paper into tiny square bites. In a matter of minutes I had successfully done what all the popular girls told me to do in seventh grade. Like Weird Al, I ate it. I ate all of it.
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.
literally stories 