I can’t count how many times I’d searched on those particular terms. This was the night, though, that I found the answer. Clicked the link. Admitted to myself that I have never, ever given up hope.
Auspicious day
August 8, 2008Every day appears auspicious if you base your evaluation on the crowds outside the Rock River Casino bus office. The men and women shuffle toward the bus, clutching purses and bags, ready to ride toward Napa Valley but interested in gold, not rosé. Two by two they board and sit. Two by two they return, with or without their fortunes.
Doppler effect
August 6, 2008In the afternoon, he took her skirt in his hands, balled it up like tissue, pushed it up to her hips. She cried a little, and outside the house, a train drew out its whistle, a police siren rose and fell out of hearing, and a child shouted as he ran down the street toward a friend. The sounds were already dropping to a lower key, as quickly as he would replace her skirt where he found it.
Accident
August 4, 2008In this city on the water, seagulls holler overhead, louder than the trucks rattling by on the freeway below. One morning, metal scraped a long, angry tear on the freeway, and for a moment, the neighborhood silenced, like one of those moments when every conversation at the party stops. Even the gulls wheeled mutely, headed back to the port, outrunning the stop-action below. They left as if they knew it would be only minutes before the helicopters arrived to slice the air into ribbons of rhythmic noise.
Pitch
July 30, 2008“It’s Karate Kid meets Good Will Hunting,” the aspiring screenwriter told his friend. “Can’t you see the trailer? Wouldn’t you go see that?”
The friend shrugged.
“The problem I have is writing the tearjerking part,” the screenwriter said. “I have no problem with the comic stuff.”
Shattered
July 28, 2008Nearly a month after the wineglass shattered, light through the living room window glinted on another wayward shard, 15 steps away from the site of the breakage.
I picked it up and turned it over and over in my palm. This is how it is, I thought. There’s that moment of breakage, but weeks of finding pieces of glass in the most unexpected places do not let you forget that initial disintegration.
Afraid of relationships
July 26, 2008“Have you talked to him?” asked my mother.
“No, not since I left,” I said.
“What about the other one?” she asked.
“The other one,” I said. “Yeah, he says he wants to get together, but when I actually ask him about a specific time, he’s never available.”
“He’s afraid of relationships,” she said.
“They’re all afraid of relationships,” I said.
100 Proof 