In this one, you are holding an axe over David’s head. He is sitting below you on the cabin steps, raising a glass of clear brownish liquid to the camera, a big smile on his scarred mouth. You are wearing a brown felt man’s hat and your waist-length hair falls across the side of your face and mostly obscures your bare breasts. You want him to be your lover for more than just that one night.
Genre: Fiction
The Day I Washed Her Hair
In one moment, I am close to her. I can smell cold cream and cigarettes, my nose in her neck. I play with the gold cross she wears there, fingering it and watching the light change it yellow and gold. My hair is wet and I can feel her shoulder getting damp. Her arms are wrapped around me, my knees to my chest, the flannel of my nightie soft against my skin. It is clean and smells like it came off the line, just like the sheets on the bed. The TV glows blue. Her breaths are slow and deep, and I am falling asleep.
Straight Down the Hall and to Your Left
The bruises are still fresh on my arms and back when I meet your mother at the hospital. She is immersed in a trashy magazine when I get off the elevator. Licking her forefinger slowly, she flips the page as I sit down.
The Three Stages of Boiling
“What kind of pot do you have?”
This line of questioning pried right into our kitchen. Touchy territory. “A white one?”
“Porcelain,” she noted, a generous term for the thick pot with a stained crack running down its side.
She made notes and disappeared behind the black velvet curtain at the back of the store. I was left in front, alone. In The Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuzo says that Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.
A Single Life
I wasn’t going to mention the murder thing. I’d already told two people and that had come to no good. It would be unwise to spread the word any further.
Dirty Feet
Askia would recount how, in her final delirium, his mother had kept on about the letters that Sidi Ben Sylla Mohammed, his father, was supposed to have sent from Paris. And some photos. Which he had never seen. But then one day he went off on the same route as the absent one. He did not leave to find the missing father. He could live with gaps in his genealogy. He left because of a strange thing his mother had said: “For a long time we were on the road, my son. And wherever we went, people called us Dirty Feet. If you go away, you will understand. Why they called us Dirty Feet.”