—on the film by Jean Renoir My wife says they might be Laurel and Hardy: the thin, future son-in-law, Anatole, and the fat father of his Henriette, who clown with fishing poles at the river's edge. Pike! the fat one says. And the thin one—Did you say: the shark that lives in fresh water? Cuts…
My father stands and sways before the mirror, in the blue tiled bathroom, shaving. The wide legs of his boxer shorts empty as windsocks, the neck of his white cotton undershirt fringed with curly black hairs. My mother is asleep. Overnight his shaving brush has stiffened into the shape of a flame. When he swirls…
You're going to waste away in dreams so thin they'll slide down a long straw and disappear in a stream going counterclockwise in Tasmania. We're having fritters and syrup, wheatcakes and strawberry butter, double-roasted coffee, and heavy cream. It's your summer solstice, blue green basic morning. This is positively your last chance. I mean it….
Better to have three announcers trip over each other's tongues than let silence go out like a lethal gas over the airwaves, as if silence were anything but a figment of our imaginations— when one sound stops another is always right there to take its place, so where would we ever have heard it— even…
Sometimes all the meanness in our house condenses to thick smoke: the black-lettered words from our fights, gray mist of barely nasty thoughts, the chemical grimness of our meals, oils secreted while screaming, even the runny filth of our son's diapers steams into our faces like fog from some poisoned sea to blind us, choke…
In heartland cafeterias, I hear the resolute chirp of women heaping pale food on white platters, tuna surprise, baby corn niblets, flash-frozen cod, potatoes whipped, ridged, stuffed, mashed, washed down with peach cobblers, coconut pie, sighing under vanilla ice cream in a scoop, and loaves, wafers, snaps, strips, squares, puffs, crullers, cakes, guests at the…
You'd think we'd be used to it, but it's an odd party, all of us in one room, the world in the other, language in its white gloves circulating with finger-foods and billets-doux—for you? For you? What to do but take its word for things —our humble servant, our only foreign correspondent, making some kind…
Like an accordion, a plastic, penicillin-green curtain stretched and cordoned off the room, aluminum handles disappearing with a click into the wall. Mrs. Hansen then nodded behind her bifocals as Theresa Mills stood unaspiringly in front of the corkboard, bleeding crucifix, and flag to read out loud the first chapter from our Social Studies text,…
I know the place where her body was found. In a tidepool near the fishing rocks where the children once caught a starfish. They placed the starfish in a pie plate filled with an inch of brine. For days it writhed but so slowly the arms didn't seem to move like hour hands on clocks….
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