Issue Thirty-Five

Looking back, I could’ve stopped it. When my uncles, my mother’s brothers, the five-headed mass of them, cornered me at her funeral and said, “Irene was a saint,” I could’ve said no, she wasn’t. Could’ve said, you didn’t know her like I did. 

One day, the ice sculptor began to melt. As it happened, he came to realize he had a few regrets. He regretted having become an ice sculptor for one thing—there was no stability in it, it had never quite felt like a solid career. His parents had hoped for a more conventional sort of success.

Polly was supposed to be an expert, but she couldn’t do it anymore. How does one stay balanced and regulated when the world is overflowing with stupid and greedy and your mom is dying and your child just got called mop-boy at school even though she’s a girl and beautiful to you and you promised yourself you would lose weight but you ate three cookies waiting for the water to heat for your first coffee and your phone therapy clients have problems that make your life sound like a dream?

When the hammer comes down, the constituent parts of a cell phone will go their separate ways. It is just a beautiful dream left unrealized, but when annoyed by the texting driver or oblivious teenager holding up the line, rerunning it can never fail to brighten the day.

To get to her riding lessons, Malin had to peddle her banana-seat bike up a dirt road. One steep hill usually forced her off the bike.

They were there, every other day, at the beach. I used to come every day. To see the wind, hear the air pop like bubble-wrap on the shore. I’d come at night: the wind was wet, free from the tongues of visitors, save me. But I’m more of a resident.

You asked me what would happen if you ate a watermelon seed, and when I said it would grow a plant in your belly, you didn’t hesitate, just popped the seed right into your mouth and swallowed it whole, laughing as it slipped down into warm and wet caverns.

Your mother was fond of saying things don’t always happen, but when they do, they always happen in three’s. So you learned very young to count events, not apples or sticks or stones, on your fingers. When you got to three, you’d start all over again.

You were my first real crush: a “late for Algebra 2 so we could walk into the classroom together, save my art project that you complimented during critique, make my friend look at the bus list for the field trip because I was too nervous to see if we were on the same one, butterflies in my throat” crush.

Pops begged for a cigarette in hospice. So Beth bummed two smokes off a tattooed nurse, lighting one in Pops’ mouth with hers—two cigarettes kissing. They smoked, Pops coughing and rattling. The nurse glared. Pops died.

Einstein, wearing a grey, stretched-out sweater and worn, baggy pants, stood in the center of the elevator car, some papers and folders tucked under his arm. The car stopped at the third floor.

It starts with a sound coming from the room you don’t go into anymore. The first time you hear it, you convince yourself it came from the kitchen.

I wanted you to be delivered, hoisted up and kept safe. The sharp shells beckoned. The night was supposed to blanket, warm, safe, instead of rocks.

The complex phobias knew they were superior. They conquered adults, not mere children. They were difficult to treat. They fucked up big chunks of people’s lives. Someone with arachnophobia or aerophobia could pretty easily avoid spiders or planes. But try making a decent life with agoraphobia.

He squeezed the trigger. Click. He squeezed again, twice. Click. Click. Impatient, he tossed the pistol into the field of ripe wheat, flushing out a murder of crows, then turned back to his canvas, a changed man.

The father doesn’t know where he’s going. He tells the mother to pull the map out of the glove compartment. Two little girls in the back seat. I want ice cream, the smaller one says. She is only three, but already a princess. This is how she will be the rest of her life.

My son says Santa isn’t real, but I’m dying tonight. Snarling at sleigh bells, I sink beneath bloody bubbles into a whirl of bathwater. The Jacuzzi swallows me like a sperm whale and spits me out when it realizes what a terrible mother I am.

Breathe through your nose and make sure the scent is inside the shed, not lingering from the critter’s wanderings the night before. Check you didn’t give her passage by leaving the door or window ajar. Find the hole.