They drive cars like bats, black ones with flat profiles. They are always out at night. She likes that she never hears them until they are all around her, that they know just where she is, even when the lights are out.
Sundog
July 2, 2008This time, I recognized the sundog on the horizon because I had seen one, once, while driving to work through a life that seemed to have happened in a dream or a novel I read. It was only when a coworker asked if I had seen it that I realized what it was.
This sundog evaporated as the plane moved forward, which dropped my stomach as effectively as if we had suddenly fallen several hundred feet to avoid turbulence. From my window seat, it appeared I was the only one who noticed.
Blurred
June 30, 2008It was as if she could only assess the situation by looking into a clouded mirror to see what was behind her. Outlines blurred, details fuzzed over, and eventually it made more sense to her to just make things up, develop alternate agendas for the players she could barely discern. After all, the only other option would have been to stop looking altogether, and mirror or no mirror, she wasn’t quite ready for that.
Proud mama
June 28, 2008In the middle of a sentence, she whooped and pointed toward the shoreline. There, a small, angly boy stepped off a surfboard and trotted a few steps down the sand, regaining his bearings.
“Sorry,” she said, turning back to the conversation. “Had to be the proud Mama. After all, when he was born, the neurologist told us he’d never even walk.”
Not invited to the goddess camp
June 24, 2008The man dropped to his knees in the sand, began playing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” on a hand-carved flute.
“I’m living on a boat out there,” he said. “I’m camping on my friends’ land.”
He began telling tales of the back-country women who won’t sleep with him, the way they form goddess camps to which he is not invited.
“I just tell them, well, I have a god camp,” he said. “I don’t get it. I think they take the whole celibacy thing a little too far.”
A life happened
June 22, 2008A life happened there, with friends and people I loved and dirt so dark and thick it coated my fingers. The leaving happened there, too, quick and sharp as a slice through a radish. I have gone and forgotten what it felt like, as if those feelings slid underneath the water, slipped beneath the muddy brown and washed away, down some tributary that once seemed so familiar.
100 Proof 