I ring ten times before I let myself in with the key she gave me. My sister is in her bedroom standing at her full length mirror wearing a long black evening dress. She doesn’t turn to me when I call her name. She is peering into the mirror and examining the person who is in there. The TV is on. When her little dog starts licking her bare feet she kicks him away then bends down to bury her face in his fur. “Come and eat something,” I say, tugging at her hands. “I’ll make you a sandwich.” “I love you so much, Zee,” she says as she wraps her arms around my neck then looks me in the eyes and I look into hers, searching for her in there and wondering how Anais Nin could be living inside my sister. Read more →
Harriet married a gossip columnist when she was 26. It seemed like they were uncomplicated kindreds, but Richard, who liked to be referred to by his assumed, not-very-clever-at-all, pun on insert celebrity’s name here nom-de-plume, tended to bring his work home with him. At 26 and a half, Harriet was on a first name basis with the intimate life details [confirmed, unconfirmed, didn’t matter] of several hundred [or so] people of varying degrees of local and pop-culture relevance. At 26 and three quarters, she’d acquired a keenness for the d-listers. She found their tenacity fascinating—how they would barrel forward from their short-lived sitcom personas or sporting careers or various other feats of fleeting notoriety, putting themselves in increasingly more bizarre and perverse situations to squeeze the last seconds out of their proverbial 15 minutes. She’d try the same pharmaceuticals they did, for re-creational purposes. She would buy their jewelries or perfumes or clothing lines with the same conviction estranged sisters sip tea after years of frostbitten phone conversations: just happy to be there to share something in common after so long. Read more →
When the first man disappears, his absence is blamed on a top-secret business meeting, or an illicit affair. A dollop of gossip for cocktail hour, a garnish for the canapés.
Cottage time is for unwinding. For being one with nature. It’s when the wives wear subtle makeup and sport sweatpants with cartoon bear-claw-slashes on their bums. They’re mostly second wives or first wives with second noses. Read more →
There are children playing in the snow where your bus stops. You carefully walk around them, watching them dig until they reach the ground, shape cylinders and hardened snowballs at the edge of the sidewalk with slivers of frozen mud, their gloves dirty.
You wonder why they are searching for mud now instead of waiting for spring. Read more →
I’m taking it Jonas told me on the 504A because it’s a good line. You didn’t think of it he said you said it and you would’ve let it go. I the curator saw the value. Yes but it’s mine I said because I said it.
The line was as follows I’m looking for another Monet with a hideous body of work. We were preparing our speeches for the funeral of esteemed poet Peter Norman of similar once-removed relation to us both. Jonas too was a poet or so he fancied himself to be and I was no poet so there was another thing working in his favour vis à vis the thieving of the line. Read more →
“Hey, is this the back of the line? Vous faites la queue pour—?”
“Yeah, this is the end. Whoa, back it up, buddy: six feet, at least.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all about that. It’s not my first time.”
“Well then, keep your distance, okay?” Read more →