On that lawn each morning a little girl’s sandal rests in the grass. Today the flip-flop for weeks became a pink gellie, the color of my skin disease, but lighter. The white truck gassing mosquitoes just whined by in the dark, convincing no one. I wonder, as if to say goodbye, if the driver has a newspaper on his bench seat. I just got bit. After Labor Day, the ice cream van that played the theme from“The Sting” and Bach fugues stopped making its crawling rounds. I just now noticed it gone. Soon it will be summer again, I believe for a moment. Vampires are cool. That’s why they are so cool. I could explain everything, will be my last joke. My arrangements are not up to date. I prefer Basie’s. The rumor around the mill village is that a nuclear scientist haunts my house. I have denied nothing. I like to look at salt even more than I like to use it, it is so clean and chaste, making the heavy water lighter, lighter than the sea that drained from his scalpeled cheek in the midst. That shoe, later it got rained on, almost sweetly, but too late.
Further Reading
UNDERDOG DAYS
by Beatriz Seelaender
BREEDING MUTTS “And there is only one thing in our way and, at times, (this) invalidates our qualities. I want to allude to what I could call a ‘Mongrel Complex’. I am imagining the reader’s shock:—‘And what would that be?’ I will explain—by ‘Mongrel Complex’ I mean the position of inferiority in which Brazilians […]
LUCKY’S SOLILOQUY by Robert Loss
One afternoon I couldn’t think straight. I’d just come home and dropped my valise on the hardwood floor when I realized that I’d forgotten to wipe my snowy, muddy shoes on the rough rug in the kitchen. I thought of the rug in that way: “rough.” In what way could a rug be “rough,” I […]
The Miracle of Ordinary
by Janette Schafer
The only things that remain of his past as a drug dealer are the physical indicators: pocked track marks in the creases of his arms, outlines of faded tattoos from decades ago, scars from the knife attacks of heroin-starved junkies or pushers trying to thrust themselves into his territory. He is a quiet older man […]
