I'm with stupid. It's Jerry's favorite T-shirt. He wears it all the time. It doesn't matter where we're going, he'll wear the shirt. Church, court, the museum-- he just shrugs his shoulders and gives me that grin when I ask him not to wear it. The more inappropriate the occasion, the more it seems to spur him to wear it.
Jerry's never really cared about impressions, that I get. But he also doesn't seem to get that I do. Sometimes, I think he gets some sick pleasure out of watching me squirm while he's talking to a prospective client at...
The dapper man picked up a penny. He rolled it around in his fingers, enjoying the coolness of it. It was raining, and he had had only seen it because the bronze colour had shone up in the middle of a shallow puddle.
The dapper man remembered a rhyme he had heard when he was tiny. See a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck. He thought there might be more to it than that, but that was enough for now. He had a Very Important Meeting to go to that afternoon, and if a bit...
The bottom of the fountain was a shimmering mural of pennies, the dapper man reached in and picked up a penny, this particular one caught his eye, something gleamed differently about it, something that niggled in his memory. He had a vision of walking this route as a boy, knickers and plaid, a little beret on his dark head.
As the memory became clear he saw his mother, in her radiance that was lost as he got older. The years withered her frame emaciated her skin mere parchment covering frail bones. Cancer. She had died not long after his fifth...
You know damn well the head is in the box. You know damn well how this movie will end. But her legs are across yours and she shaved. They're smooth like you could have only guessed, because in winter she was all jeans and tights.
You've been hovering with your hand on her knee and she's so into this damn movie that you've seen one hundred times. She hasn't mentioned that she thinks about sleeping with Brad Pitt, but you see the way her eyes get when he comes on screen. She has yet to give you those eyes, but...
Pointing skyward, his finger aflame.
"Can you come here a minute?"
Trying to catch the attention of surf but drawing only seagulls, which landed on his fingertip and looked around stupidly in the low sky of November.
My whole life is a finger on fire, and wrong things coming to help. A man wearing a hat. Some flotsam. A ship in the dead of night, a drunken captain
Peasants. That's what I thought when I looked out the window. Nothing but peasants on the street below. Uneducated people. I watched as one of them gave birth. Immediately, she put her baby in a tree. There was a bees' nest there and the bees stung the baby. Even from up here I could hear the baby scream. The baby fell out of the tree. I think it broke a leg because it didn't move after that. The baby just cried and screamed and ate fig newtons. It bled too. A lot.
Slowly, I ate my Almond Joy bar.
Gweedo,...
Nothing here that means anything other than dust and time stretching out.
We are the expression of the infinite
The unknowable
Behind our eyes - depths unthinkable
ineffable
We are sons and warriors, clerks and middle men. Heartbreaking failure, transcendant triumph.
We crowd about this nothing, this dust shaped void. we are the forms and the edge of the void that is the whole.
We are singing you home.
“Pob lwc.” the elder of Saint Joseph’s had wished me, after his strange warning. I presumed he meant for my first Mass to be held, as traditional, at Midnight on Christmas Eve. It went well, the service, with a fuller than expected attendance, to see the ‘new man’, I presumed.
Later, sat still in just the candle light, I sighed, thinking I’d found a final home. It was then that the Bwgan Fawr sighed too. A man of middling years, he seemed, from one of the middling centuries, but as translucent as chip paper fat.
He pointed at the great...
The desert rose would always grow.
It knew nothing of circumstances beyond its control. Nothing of bodies drying in the sun, baked by heat on the hot sand. All that mattered was the sun and the wind and just enough moisture to survive.
The girl turned, picked the pink blossom, and tucked it into the soldier's kaki colored uniform. The color clashed happily with the washed out surroundings, almost as much as the smile with which he repaid her small kindness.
"I could never be a poet because I just can't seem to master the semicolon," I said.
"Not that hard to figure out, really," she replied. "Google it."
It wasn't that big of a deal to me. To be honest, I didn't even like poetry. Still, I Googled it anyway, and found out more than I ever wanted to know about the semicolon.
Later that night, I was hit by a semi; I had to have a section of my colon removed.
Uncanny, that was...