FICTION:
Thirty bucks a day my Papi pays me to help him paint on Saturdays and Sundays. Thirty bucks. Big deal. I hate working on the weekends. I can make ten times that much running dime bags for Edwin, but here I am, half asleep at 5 a.m., waiting for my “wake up” call to go to another job I don’t like and don’t want. Papi’s clueless to these feelings, of course. Right before he shakes me awake, I jerk rigid into a sit-up position and bug my eyes out. He jumps back, sees it’s a joke, and acts like he’s having a heart attack.
A man sits in a garden with the sun slowly rising through the trees at the edge of his property. Still wearing his blue funeral suit beneath a flimsy overcoat, he’s cold but not quite freezing here on the last day of March. He’s spent the night in the garden, drifting in and out of consciousness, because he can’t face the silence awaiting him inside.
• Sup
I be trippy about this journal from the get-go, and that get-go was just yesterday when I open this Word doc and then zombied out. Lost in the sauce. I ask if I can just use a dig recorder or a video app when I get a new blower. That way, you know, I talk my thoughts out.
But they tell me to type this shit down cause a teacher at BrightFutures School for juvies — the Brights — think I got writing talent, which def ain’t what the teach at the norms school say, the one who call me unliterate. But how to start?
Yo journal! Sup?
Yo JJ! Sup wid you?
When the first baby was planted in her belly at fifteen, Viera’s momma made her take it out to the swamps. It was nothing but a little thing when born, squirted out on the bathroom floor beside the toilet four months premature.
“That’s why it needs to go,” Momma said, not giving notice to her blubbering. “It ain’t cooked all the way. See! Not cooked, Viera.”
Damian nudged Marcus and told him to get ready. It was the second time the maroon-colored Buick with tinted windows and original hubcaps had rounded the corner. Damian didn’t have any customers with that particular Detroit make and model and, being who he was and where he was sitting, he reached behind him, gripping a pistol wedged between his blue jeans and skin.
Marcus did the same. But Marcus was fourteen. He wasn’t smooth in how he armed himself, owning a pair of eyes that were two inches wide and unblinking with fear.
A shrill voice, like a sharp left hook, rushed from the far side of the cavernous room. “WHERE THE HELL IS EVERYBODY?” a wiry little man shouted in a high raspy voice and burst into the gym squeezing new leather luggage in both fists. A glinting gold crucifix bounced under his open blue Hawaiian shirt as he looked around the gym in a panic.
John Wylie, Glasgow merchant, hoists his son Billy onto his shoulders; elevated above a sea of ladies’ bonnets: pink, peach, mauve, lilac; a frothy softness punctuated by an unruly jumble of black stove-pipe hats. On patent-leather tip-toe, the gentlemen stretch for a better view....
“Stop squirming, boy,” says his father. “Look Billy, there’s the Prince of Wales. See, see him now…there. Sit at peace!” and he nips Billy’s leg. Hard.
“He’s over-excited Johnnie. Leave the wee lamb be…he’s only six, for the love of God.” Elspeth Wylie’s languid voice trails away.
NONFICTION:
When my sons were little, we spent hours manipulating clay with the Play-Doh fun factory. Remove fresh clay from small tubs. Massage it, flattening it into the compartment. Squeeze handle, forcing out red, blue, and purple shapes. My breast tissue presses in, the handle lowers and squeezes it through the outlines at the other end: long star-shaped tubes and skinny noodles. Lime green, yellow, eggplant, scarlet.
Camp Beginnings looked like Camp Dahlia, only smaller. The lake was smaller, the cabins were smaller, and there weren’t as many trees or campers. I didn’t mind that it was smaller. My counselor seemed nice, and the other girls were friendly. The first thing I didn’t like was breakfast—a bowl of watery oatmeal topped with a few sour blueberries, delivered with a crash by a frowning elderly lady named Cook. I ate it and looked around for more—bread, fruit, juice, potatoes, even a second serving of oatmeal, but my counselor, surprised when I asked her if there was anything else, said there wasn’t.
There were many days when C. Horner emerged like a mole from the subway tunnel, fell in line with the others who shoved their tickets into the turnstile slots and were in turn spit out through the clicking machines, was conveyed up to the street by the endless escalator, and emerged to walk past the usual hoodlums sitting on the cement block by the alley and the frail waifs crouching along the chain-link fence that enclosed the Mission Library branch, begging for change. He crossed the street in a daze, the sun dazzling him through the mist blowing in over Twin Peaks, turned the corner on 23rd St. for the home stretch, and passed by his favorite character, T.J. Eckleberg, who sat in his customary spot on the sidewalk outside the corner convenience store.
Mr. Litwin was a small wiry man with a few wisps of white hair, an intensely intelligent face, and one outfit: jeans, t-shirt, and a black bomber jacket. I was instantly intrigued by this octogenarian who commuted to and from Litwin’s Fine Furniture on a motorcycle with a red milk crate zip-tied on back and was often visible schlepping back and forth from his brick storefront to trucks that loaded or unloaded aged finery. I love old things and more particularly, old wooden things, so one day I cautiously stepped out of the brilliant noon-day sunshine into the shop. It was dark and cool, redolent with the smell of tung oil and mahogany, oak, maple, and cherry, and dotted with porcelain and silver.
POETRY:
• Knowing
Even as a child, my mother never talked down to me,
neither babytalk
nor prattle, reader of more than fairytale or slick B’rer
Rabbit trickery
before knowing better...
• from A Week on the Concord & Merrimac Rivers • XI, XII, XIII
Our course now curved gracefully to the north.
Here, on the sloping banks, carpenters worked
at mending a scow, as busily as hornets
& mud wasps, with tools gleaming in the sun.
• Myth
They waited impatiently, mainly for you to fail:
Who were you to compete with the poets,
who would no doubt find writing a ghost
story simple child’s play? ...
• After 71 Years of Marriage: What My Mother Said
first I knew of your dad he lived in that hobbled together
house on the main road
when we still lived in the back woods but your Aunt Tillie
being my best friend and
your dad being one of her 6 brothers I was bound to
catch a glimpse of him now
& then but truth be told in Sunday School when we were
only 5 or 6 years old
I hardly paid him any mind