Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway.
Passersby ignored the frail, shivering thing, their eyes never dropping, their heads never turning. She might have been a doll in a window, or something someone left behind. She wasn't any of their business.
A little round boy with a little round face in his little grey jacket wrapped around his little round belly poked at the girl with his little round foot.
The girl, who wasn't much older than he, looked up from the protective valley of her arms and smiled at him. The little...
Potatoes.
That's all the six year old girl would eat. And it seemed that no matter what else I tried to serve her, potatoes was it. She wouldn't try anything else. Wouldn't look at anything else. All she ever wanted? Potatoes.
"Honey, what are we supposed to do?" I sighed, sliding into bed that night. "We went out to the Olive Garden. And she asked for potatoes!"
My husband chuckled a little. "Well, look on the bright side: at least it's a vegetable she wants. Could be worse."
"This is bad enough! No protein! No grain! Heck, even sugar would...
"I shot my butler, but I did not shoot the chauffeur" Mrs. Kensington said. "I don't know who could have done such a thing. That poor old man."
"The butler or the chauffeur," the detective asked.
Mrs. Kensington coughed with polite outrage.
"The chauffeur, of course," she said. "The butler can rot in a thousand hells as far as I'm concerned."
The detective flipped back a few pages in his notebook.
"You say the butler had been stealing from you," he asked, scratching his nose. "Did you have any proof?"
"Proof is in the pudding, as the maid would say."...
There's somebody standing in the corner of my room. He just stands there in diffused light - brooding and making no noise.
Oddly enough, he makes no attempt at escaping. Perhaps its because I stapled him to the dresser drawer as he had refused to have his picture taken.
He looks so much better in person anyway...
White sky. The sky was so white. Sky-white. Sky-writing white smoke in the white sky.
But the bayou was blue. I'm humming it now. Bayou-blue. The snapped crayon read "you-blue."
I wanted to say something. What do I want to say. I raced through my mind looking for a word. Where is it?
What is it?
Sky-white? Bayou-blue. Nah, neither of them. I want to say "succumb" or "parse". Maybe "grenadine"?
I peeled the surface of the bayou up like a t-shirt transfer. But too soon. The corner wrinkled.
The sky went blue
I jumped. I blacked out. When I awoke, head ringing and eyes spotted with colours, he turned round slowly.
"You ever heard of an Ox Bow Lake?"
"nuhuh" I said. Mind you, the gag would have rendered the same result as a Shakespeare soliloquy.
"sahwiwochee" Hell, it was different. Maybe if you were a dentist, this conversation would be less one sided. I eyed the man who had broken in to the lab, wondering if he'd had orthodontist training. He knew his way round a physics lab alright, but fiddling with the quantum accelerator probably wasn't the best idea. That...
The first time I saw Tommy, I knew he was a total douche. I don't allow my sister to date douches; shit — no brother should. That's rule number 2.
Rule number 1, in case you are wondering, is that you don't interfere with your sister's romances. But I take exception with douches.
Of course, there's a perfectly civil way to address his low-life status without resorting to a politically un-savvy term like "douche," which can alienate the polite, women, and my parents equally well, but anyone who knows me will say there ain't a bone of misogyny in this...
"Well shit, that didn't work," the conductor said.
He walked around the wreckage, pulling out passengers. Women, mostly. The men waved off his advances.
One gloriously attired woman emerged from a smoldering welt of torn metal as though she were departing at Poughkeepsie. Nary a scratch or displaced hat-feather.
"You are the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on," the conductor thought. What he said was, "Ma'am."
The day was still high above them, children kicking rocks along the tracks. The conductor scratched under his hat and wondered, well what the hell now?
A man sitting in the...
Love did me in.
It slows you--but not in the bad way
bad is when you
can't react, when
you're reaching for
the doorknob you
should have locked
and only moved when
you saw the shadow
at the front window.
It slows good--like syrup from a tree
like honey from a jar's bottom
like the moments between kisses
like a squeeze behind the knee
Being done in = finished. It = death
It is death.
All previous files have been
gathered, tied, and then burned.
Anything that remains is read
with eyes that perceive former
self as stranger. As intruder....
Six minutes...
Was that really all he had left? Three hundred sixty seconds? Well, less than that, now.
He looked into the eyes of his family, gathered around him atop the hill.
What was a man supposed to do in a situation like this? Pray? Meditate? Impart wisdom? Plan some last words? They'd have to be really special... You only got one chance at Last Words.
He thought for a moment. Two hundred seconds, now.
He nodded imperceptibly, straightened his back, and reached for a pair of scissors. With a confident, even snip, he pulled away a handful of hair...