Bashar Jihad, the Palestinian driver, did not slow until two fresh IDF draftees were about to fire at him and his wife, Layla Jihad, who, her robe hiked up and her knees wide and suffering, lay on the back seat. Her unborn child was in breech position.
The next morning she worked out with tears streaming down her face. “A year you’ve been with me” she said. “You and I are in this together” she said. “You can’t go” she said. Then finally “Please don’t.”
At the self-checkout, he scanned the soup and paid with his credit card. Then he scanned the other items but rather than paying he cancelled the order. He packed the soup in one bag, the other expensive items in another and left the candy in the cart.
“Aw, cut the shit, Bob. You know what I’m driving at. But alright, I’ll quit beating about the bush. I think she’s got someone else and I think you know all about it. Has she got someone else?”
Behind another fence, the small boy is crying again. The bigger children are teasing him because he calls for his p-p-papa and his m-m-mama in his sleep, because he wets his thin mattress while he clings to his toy clown.
I wanted to stop and join the old Borrachos at their party, the one on the stoop. I wanted to, so badly, whatever cheap swill they had between them, whatever cheap tobacco in their hand rolled cigarettes, I wanted to stop and join them.
Pam knew she wasn’t real. The calm, effective yoga studio manager that other people saw was a front she put up, “Guru Baba’s right-hand woman.” No one knew about her missing pieces, or the pills in her purse, waiting in a small plastic case.
Things weren't the same as before, you didn't have to play nice anymore, you just played it loose, off the cuff. Any trouble and you could ad-lib. Bullshit was the new currency. He'd already had that in spades, so he figured he was ahead of the game.
I reckoned my twin brother was using a time machine when he died. He developed the thing at home, while on sabbatical from his job as a poetry professor.
I’m not copying the vocabulary words Miss Hiller squeaked out with her stub of white chalk. Instead, using my crayons, I’m drawing a picture of her inside the back cover of my phonics workbook. I’m going to name it “Hag-face Hiller, the Fourth-Grade Killer.”
The room smells of fear, sweat and urine, and as the indio goes on, I scowl at his ruddy face and try to forget the guerilla in the Petén jungle who ruined my leg so long ago. He too was dirty, conniving and disloyal, and he too stared at me with dark, inscrutable eyes.
The clash between the protesters and police. The police using pepper spray to keep them back, grabbing and zip-tying those refusing to move. The swarm of bikers turning off the road, some onto the side streets, others onto the bike lane that went back over the river to Brooklyn.
So far, kissing was all mechanics and momentum, no communion. She thought there must be something wrong with her. She was like the Betsy McCall paper doll on the last page of her mother's monthly magazine.
"Well, perhaps you can do your sermon on Job instead. I've always found that to be such an intriguing story. All the difficulties he faced, his tribulations, and his struggle to be patient and obedient. Yes, I would love to hear you preach about Job."
So they threw me up in the prison in Limon. Wasn’t supposed to be for too long, but I had a mouth on me at that point in life and I had the hands to back it up, so one thing led to another and ultimately I was there for a bit of an ‘extended stay’ as you might call it now.
The oldest attendee is the ex-priest who looked out for us on the way up and is now married. He was very concerned with the local paper listing sexual abusers that had been on his team and may be wrongfully accused by grifters looking for money from the church.
As I prowl through rain-slicked streets, the neon storefronts refract off my side windows, my steering wheel spinning left or right of its own volition. My hum a low growl. I do what the sensors on the roof rack tell me to do.
Within 20 minutes, I unplugged the furry little beast from the USB socket and patted its audibly purring back. It was warm. I was impressed, immediately enchanted. These devices are extremely lifelike!
Again he looked at me as if he had just met the village idiot. “If you haven’t written down what your complaint is about, how do you expect them to address it? They haven’t got time to write it down for you.”
For a few days I got caught up in a fantasy about a doggie cathouse. The girl dogs lounged around in provocative garments, while the doggie madam, a blowsy old Irish setter, negotiated with the customers. I began to think I was losing it.
I nod and do a sneaky line off my wrist, Sam glowers at her bag and then grabs the shaker and does a line of her own. It is three nights since we slept together and neither will mention it to the other.
Once inside, I quickly got a feel for my surroundings. It smelled awful. Like something had died and rotted in here. The floor was sticky and there was no way I was going to sit in that chair. I wanted to get his over with.
It is evening all afternoon. Winter all spring and summer. There are nights when Mr. Mallard looks up from his desk and swears he sees the shadow of his missing wife brush to and fro before the panes.
I remember my foreman at the mill coming around and handing out postcards for us to sign against the owl. They were all filled out ahead of time—you just signed ‘em. The yellow ribbons too. That was a big thing.
Some would call my gaze a sacrilege, but I thought of those generous cheeks as a sacrament, a gift to get me through the eternity of Father Brayton’s droning explanations, his everlasting sermons on eternity.
When they’d met Emily she’d wanted to hear all of the details of their shockingly sexual past and Sara relished in bragging about how Miriam had held her against that terrible kibbutznik mural and she’d compared Miriam’s own muscles to the ones on the wall and she’d felt safe and absolutely overcome by desire.
I wander a bit closer. And that’s when I see the people. People everyone. Some on the boat, some in the water, some diving off the boat into the Aegean. Mainly men, but women and children are there too. And screaming.
“Everyone!” I shouted. My hands were cupped around my mouth, but it hardly amplified my voice, especially since a crackling had taken over the air (the wildfires, I knew, were right around the corner). “The world is ending! Clutch your loved ones tight or whatever, but I’m telling you right now—the end is nigh!”
He handed me a small piece of paper with a number on it. I took it and stared at it for what seemed a long time. Then, I stood up and tore it apart in front of the man's eyes. I moved right in front of him, so now his face was at the height of my genitals.
My life had become terribly simple over this last year and a half. Common concerns for family and comfort and profitable activity no longer troubled my mind.
But I am not insane. I simply hear the discordant music others cannot hear. And see events that others cannot see. And there’s nothing I can do to stop the circle of events or affect them—or even warn the players in them.
Back then, if Holy Shit passed my lips, the nuns would whack me on the backs of my legs with their 18” wooden rulers. But for some reason, saying Holy Crap was okay.
No one told you when you decided to become a parent, when you opened up your thighs and body and heart so you could create a tiny wrinkled newborn that tore her way out of you, that you would need to have this conversation.
Am I really so disgusting to you that you don't answer me ... But it's okay ... Someday you and I will become legends, and time will judge us. Then it will be too late to change anything. And now times are not easy. 'Exit the thought from the cloud' ... Who said so?
Holding my knapsack tight, the one I had packed with a few provisions for the inevitable chaos, I unzipped it and, from the fridge, filled it with the few pieces of fruit that had not gone moldy and a half-empty bottle of warm juice and some cookies.
Barbara returned home from work to find “Die Bitch!” painted in blood-red letters next to her front door. She called the police. Barbara was stroking Cora when two officers, a man and a woman both clean cut and tired, arrived twenty minutes later.
Everyone knew Jamie’s father was not just intelligent but kind, someone whose vast collection of former students made a daily practice of honoring him with their high moral standards and overall generosity. But something had happened to him:
I did as he suggested and the doctor reassured me: the bangs were not real. My brain was intact. He took my pulse and my blood pressure and declared them to be within acceptable limits. He said I had what he called Exploding Head Syndrome. He said it wasn’t serious.
He decided a molecule was the answer. He may have lived alone, but he was surrounded by molecules, molecules of all sorts, billions if not trillions, he assumed. Having an audience of one molecule, the right molecule, could surely help him focus his thoughts.
That night I vividly dreamt that the soft skin of the Gorgeous was wrapped around me, cocooning me in a heaven made only for me. Then it unwrapped itself and showed me the true world, with its demons and degenerates wielding clubs and advancing on us.
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