July 2011
31 posts
No. 252
“No one in this room has met me!” There was assent all the around. The boy stuck both arms straight out and lurched toward me and my friend until his outstretched hands almost struck our kneecaps, at which point we deflected his limbs with quick handshakes. He beamed. “Hi, I’m Asa!” We traded our names for his and beamed back, but Asa was not satisfied with merely an...
June 2011
30 posts
No. 251
Between the tree trunk and its downturned branch, I can see a young, bespectacled man. He has long pants on despite the sun, and his heavy boots are planted defiantly in a bright patch of clover. The greenery in the park around him shines compared to his black clothes. His hair is pulled back in a neat ponytail, and his beard is trimmed to a point; though there is a chain attached to his belt...
No. 250
trepidation, n. 1. A state of agitation or alarm. 2. An involuntary trembling. 3. The action of contemplating the not-too-distant future, newspaper article on incurable job jugglers trapped in an inhospitable economy in hand, as a college student with three summer jobs and tens of thousands of dollars in debt already accrued anyway for the sake of a high-quality secondary education. 4. The feeling...
No. 249
Hello, Ambrose Mbogo. I see that you are 92 years old and a farmer. I also have your code, but that is for later, when I have finished turning you into numbers and need to remove your last vestige of humanity. For now, I will ask you some questions about what you would like to plant this first season. It is rainy, by the way.
You would like coffee and tea, of course, because there will always be...
No. 248
Eggs, milk, oil. Beat them. Add flour and salt. Swing your skillet, make sure it’s heavy iron like you’d use for an omelet. Coat the bottom with as little oil as possible, and adjust your stove so that the whole pan is constantly, evenly hot.
Prepare for later: get out the nutella, the strawberries and the blueberries, the cinnamon and sugar and bananas. Pull your sweet things off of...
No. 247
Early in the morning, I’ll be waiting. Early in the morning, when you are uncurling and forgetting your dreams, I’ll be sitting on the crooked front steps with my fingers laced through the railing with the peeling paint. I’ll be listening for your tread in the hall, and when you open the door to check your mailbox, I will fly up like a geyser and rush inside to fill your house.
...
No. 246
So I’m sitting right here, answering emails, enjoying the evening - the usual. Not moving much because I don’t want the fireflies to leave, but typing audibly.
I hear this rustling in the bushes like a raccoon, but I figure it’s probably a woodchuck because I’ve seen a few around recently. No biggie. I hear it making a beeline for my bench, and when it emerges I turn and...
No. 245
A set of handlebars rose up. What few spots had not rusted over glinted as the handlebars flipped over the rim of the red, house-sized dumpster. Their time at the bottom of a graveyard of dismantled bicycles (and then at the bottom of a truck bed of the same) was erased in this one moment of flight, hurtling end over end into yet another conglomeration of unwanted parts.
They were flung by the...
No. 244
In the breeze from outside, strands of my hair escape from their bun and brush my neck. This has happened too much in the last three weeks for me to reasonably mistake them for soft fingers, but I still do.
There is no human speech in earshot, only the occasional rustling of a bag, the slice of turning pages, and the hesitant tapping of keystrokes. A distant lawnmower’s hum rides in with...
No. 243
Friend, don’t lay your weary head on my shoulder and tell me it’s all for naught. Didn’t we know when we started out that we never really had a purpose in the first place? Wasn’t it this meaninglessness that gave us the freedom to do as we did? I stood at the brink of an epiphany, remember, and had to jump either to great potential or great apathy - I chose the former...
No. 242
Say I pay my taxes. Say the government spends them as it sees fit, and part of it goes to grants. This is all good and well; I am doing my bit, everyone else is doing their bit, and I would really love a grant, so I’m all for the chance to apply for those.
Now say I enter politics as, for example, a mayor. I’m starting small, but I have big plans for my hometown, and I could really...
No. 241
Her motives are impenetrable. She communicates poorly, despite frequent and varied efforts - often, people read their own desires into the long stares she resorts to giving them with her round, brown eyes. She lives at the whims of others.
Thunderstorms give her the willies, as do noises people around her can’t hear and remote controlled devices. She’s vocal about things that give her...
No. 240
Over your morning cup o’ joe, you peer out of the picture windows behind the dining room table and search for the bright streaks of color that used to plummet and float through your backyard, on the prowl for their breakfast. The comic sight of a fluffily red-breasted fellow yanking an unnaturally elastic worm out of the ground eludes you in the twelve and a half minutes it takes to drain...
No. 239
I’d get there, worn clear through from hours of traveling, carrying my bags under my eyes instead of under my arms. They’d take one look at my frayed edges and gather me up in a series of hugs that could mend the San Andreas fault line, but then, they would do that no matter my state of arrival. My feet would be lifted off the ground and my legs swung up in a spinning arc of joyous...
No. 238
One day, someone small with much to learn will ask me, “What does ‘contented’ mean?” and I will say that different people become contented different ways - but that for me when I was younger, content was watching rays of sun slant in the windows of my own house after a rainy day. Content was the weariness of eight hours doing manual labor amplified by the strain of a...
No. 237
My adventure in the beech tree began like this: it was cold. Not frigid - the sleeves of my flannel work shirt were rolled up over my elbows - but cold enough to warrant the lethargy that assaults early risers when the blood in their veins can’t seem to get heated enough to go anywhere very fast.
It crossed my mind that I should be grateful for the warmth shoveling dirt would conjure...
No. 236
My sister was raised Catholic. She has a thing with guilt. The other night at the dinner table, she and my friend Max got on the topic of doing penance, and she confessed that she’d compiled a list a while ago of things she needs to apologize for.
“I don’t even know how I’d do it for some of them,” she shrugged, not blind to the futility but also not shedding the...
No. 235
He makes noises all the time. When he’s inspecting something, reading something, hearing something, thinking about something; his moods are characterized by the sounds that come out of them. Happy moods announce themselves with scattered clicks and whistles, dolphinlike in nature and exuberance, which morph into hums in mellow times. More specific situations have their own signifiers, too -...
No. 234
How you know you’re in love, child, that’s a harder thing for me to tell you than it is for you to tell me, but if you’re asking - it’s when you can’t sit still all day waiting to be with your love; when you think about your love anytime you have nothing much else to think about; when you can go to this love and have your ruffled feathers smoothed, your lethargy swept...
No. 233
To do everything at once, or maybe to do little spread out so that I can savor it more, or maybe very spread out so I can relax all the time - but at the same time to do nothing at all, because that would be the ultimate achievement. Not to work, not to clean, not to cook, not to read or write, not to even stand up, to think, to breathe. Is the pinnacle of laziness death?
To do everything...
