A Literary Feast

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Posts from the “Uncategorized” Category

Dorothy’s Ever After

Posted on January 18th, 2014

What could I tell them? That behind the whirling curtain, “There’s a curtain. . . .” All Em could say, after not letting me go (or go on) – “What on Earth happened to your shoes, child?”   Before I met you: I loved dust; I gave up training Toto to speak; Em squeezed my hand with every passing thunderbolt.   Do you see how we dress infinity in a bowtie?   Suspicions grew when Toto stopped aging. Eternal youth. Em and Henry feared I had made some depraved pact. We were all of us ever so grateful for your attentions: You were a welcome cyclone.   You adore me. I am your door to happiness. How do I tell you that behind the…

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I Was Hungry

Posted on January 18th, 2014

I was hungry.  Not that kind of hungry that people in office buildings get when they want expensive salads and talk about their blood sugar, the kind where you’re sick to your stomach and you have a headache and even just thinking really clearly about food makes you dizzy and instead of eating all you can think about is being hungry.  I got up from where I was sitting and walked around my kitchen.  There were things in the cabinets but none of them seemed to be anything that was of any use to me.  So I put on my coat and my boots and my hat and I stepped outside.  It was nighttime.  That stars were all moving around me in such a…

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Before and After

Posted on January 18th, 2014

On the day that Anson died we went down to the water in the flat grey light and I found a rock with a split white band across it like a web of heat and put it in my pocket.  Lorna has a jar of these that sits on a shelf in the kitchen, filled with water, so that she can see them as they had been when she found them, and I wondered if she’d prefer to fill Anson’s coffin with water too, for this same reason.  But, we didn’t.  His body was burnt up and then it was parceled out and it left our hands and went into the wind one shake at a time.  The shape of it rising was like…

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Clean

Posted on January 18th, 2014

I went out to the Pacific with an alcoholic Montanan who ran the camera for a weather program and had a Jeep that smelled like soup.  I bought a key and put it on a chain around my neck and bad coffee and the rain found every unsealed part of whatever I was wearing and put its hands in there, and jesus, it was cold.  He wanted pictures of us there on the sand and I didn’t want to lie but I said sure.  The first week in a new city, a year later, my car was broken into and the photos were stolen and it seemed like it was supposed to happen that way.   Going home is mostly a process of cataloging…

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A Bandage Made of Caviar

Posted on January 18th, 2014

A friend made me dinner last night. This was great; I have been in need of a good look in the eye and a fine piece of meat, both of which my friend provided together with some red. She cooked the meal a long time, in her British way, and with her new job on the horizon and the fact I am still bleeding from a recent medical procedure we were both feeling introspective and in need of iron. At times like this I am extremely grateful for friends with working full-gas stoves and those old cast iron pans that take to butter and meat, both, in the classic style and without fuss.   I came carrying a half-gnawed loaf I had worked on…

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The Trappestine

Posted on January 18th, 2014

We came across some stuff at the edge of the campus that included a catalogue of teeth, most of a leg wearing most of a stocking, and something like a kind of smear or stain The technical term for this is Human Remains We sent for an ambulance at once, which arrived swiftly and the very personable yet professional paramedics did their best to console us and calm us down, though they had no small amount of trouble securing the smear-stain-tooth-leg-stocking person to the gurney for safe transport We found out later that the name of the smear was Angelica Bedelamante and she had been a Trappistine who had gone missing several days before At the press conference, a number of questions were asked…

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The King of Sola Mesa

Posted on September 30th, 2013

We left a little after sundown, skipping like a stone on glasswater down the old road that used to lead to other settlements, up north of the bay. Now it just spills out from Ciudad and empties at Tierra de la Agua, past the borderlands. Mostly it’s only used by water-truckers anymore, but we hustled down in a beatup old van we’d found on the outskirts and fixed up in secret that summer. In the dark the fires in the borderland shacks winked and flickered through aluminum doorways and the whole desert seemed to twinkle like dust in new light. We were poisoned with bloodrush; I dug my fingernails into the cracked plastic of the seat cushion as the van shivered its way past…

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The Melon Thief

Posted on September 30th, 2013

One morning, the melons were gone. The evening before, they sat right where intended – attached most certainly to the lovingly-tended but misplaced vine that refused to grow past spindly. We had done these melons wrong in planting them where the neighbor’s garage and dusty red Jeep stole the sunshine for most of the day, and despite our best efforts and our loving applications of worm tea and compost, we could only watch with anticipation as a few melons bulged slowly, grudgingly, into being. And one morning, they were not there. Sheared cleanly off the vine, leaving no clue or hint as to where they might have gone. Our melons were somewhat stunted and most definitely unripe, but they were ours, and we lost…

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The Cream of Unknowing

Posted on September 30th, 2013

I’ll never see it again. I’m not sure it was there in the first place. It may have been a dream, or a summer night’s hallucination. On a lonely stretch of unmarked road somewhere outside of Montague, MA, walled in by dark trees and the whisking of bats overhead, I found, or thought I found, the world’s perfect soft serve.   If you’ve spent much time with your head inside a broken-down soft serve ice cream machine, you’ll understand that it is not a commodity often associated with perfection. Soft serve begins its life as an unwieldy sack of upsettingly viscous milk product weighing perhaps forty or fifty pounds. It sloshes like the innards of a giant squid as you drag it from the…

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Hungry

Posted on September 30th, 2013

The air felt different. I had noticed a single tree with leaves that were starting to turn, crisp, brown, die. I wished that the afternoon would never end. The sun was still warm but the breeze from the river had a certain chill to it. At first I thought this story was about a boy. I realize now that that is fictional. I made it up. This is something different. I’m not actually hungry. Food tastes different. I can’t handle the thought of it anymore. I was so lonely. I could never really count on people. They judge. They disappoint. They sleep all day, or don’t call you back, or think you’re something else. The food never judges. It is comfort, reliable, company. I…

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