Issue Thirty-Four

The thing about having a child is that you’re always sick. And after a while this perpetual sickness starts to bleed into your actual health, so what started out as daycare residuum (a clogged nose and cough that feel, even without squinting too much, like an...

I didn’t want to go to the thing but he wanted me to go to the thing. He always wanted me to go to the thing and I never wanted to go. All year long, he thought about the thing and so did I. He thought about liking it and I thought about not liking it. But sometimes he thought about me not liking it and I thought about him liking it.

Minji had blisters all over her body. The pediatric industry in South Korea was on the verge of collapse. There was a shortage of pediatrics.

1. Glued to a plastic plaque, Billy flopped and sang. Thousands came to see Billy perform “Take Me to the River” and “Don’t Worry Be Happy” over and over. Back then, it never got old.

Sick rager last night, bro. All of Hell’s Kitchen now knows you’re like totes pumped to be living in the city. Good for you.

You’re hoping he can be objective, overlook that zinfandel kiss you shared last year. You were tipsy and the cool night smelled of jasmine. He silked his jacket over your shoulders

I wasn’t supposed to love her. She was an intrusion in my life. Uninvited. Unwelcomed.

After the burial, we’re taking what we want from your house. I pause to look around the living room, which smells of perfume and cat urine. The room appears even smaller now, but it’s still the interesting assortment of clutter I recall as a kid.

The doe was definitely dead. Of that, Sean could be quite certain in his diagnosis. Her eyes rolled in their sockets, glassy and cold, her neck skewed backward at a disjointed angle, and her tongue hung out her open mouth, resting on the tarmac.

Tara’s superpower was seeing the vestigial parts of her lovers. It started with the virgin sporting shadow wings. After they made love, the wings detached and fluttered about them like moths. The instructor from the spin studio with thighs like Tina Turner wagged his vestigial tail like an eager Golden retriever puppy.

3.45 am: A sharp ringtone rips through the still night. It has to be an emergency because my phone is on silent-mode for everyone else.

They board from Canal Street, the sky still a wash of pre-noon humidity. Already her feet hurt in their flimsy sandals. There’s no charge for walk-ons, her new girlfriend shrugs.

First things first. Even though I’ve been lithographed: “TEELEAF® The Fortune Telling Game” I am not, in fact, a mere parlor game. I am a fortune teller’s assistant.

The bistro table and chairs are too tall and thin to be stable, so it’s good that these three are physically flimsy. Some might say they lack all substance, but I don’t see it that way.

He dumps me at the start of the Aldous Harding show in Ashville. At the start.

at a cocktail party. I introduced myself and asked him how he knew the hostess. She’s an old friend from way back. He had reached the bottom of his martini and was now chewing the inebriated ol-ive. How about you?

On spring and summer evenings, you can hear them, the dogs sending messages to each other, the warm air a telegraph wire. Sometimes phone calls. Sometimes emails. Please advise.

Begin at the center. Begin at the heart of things. Begin at the moment you can never turn back. Dorothy may have fallen asleep amongst a field of blood red poppies on her way to the Emerald City but this, too, passed.

The T.V. talks to me late at night. Mother is always asleep and father is gone.

Inside a bar off Ditmars, John flirts with a twink who has a nosering. “I didn’t always believe either,” John says, as he lifts his martini. “But after my ex-girlfriend died, I would wake up with scratches all over me…”

Blame strong arms, the wind, your hurry to be someplace else, right now, before you change your mind and stay.

A situation like this, a loss like this, would be hard on anybody. She finishes her burrito and throws two quarters and a nickel at the toll basket. Anyone would be a mess.

It’s the parking lot straddling Addison Mall on 3rd, and here’s your standard-issue bag lady with shopping cart in tow who she haunts the lot where she lives off by the entrance where it says stop stenciled on the asphalt and there’s a signpost welcoming customers to the mall

Tumbleweeds choke the three-strand barbwire fence, a dusty line in the black night along the road. They run through the gas station parking lot like rats.

So, he’s finally found a job, and he comes home to me and the baby the first Friday he gets paid wearing this huge shiny hat that he’s tied under his chin in a leather knot that looks tangled and permanent.

Mummy likes specific things. Specific things with specific names with the specific intention of making them unique and referable. Not vague, loose.