I was desperate for a CVS, but instead found one of those birds—long neck bent like a spring, beak like a spear, caw like a motor that won’t turn over—wading in somebody’s blue blow-up pool.
She cradles the bunny to her neck. Her ring is thin and gold and has a small, dull diamond in it.
The man snorts. “Good way to get eat up,” he says. “With your goddamn eyes closed.”
The woman hums, her head bending over the softness in her hands. She smiles at the man. She had seen something in him and, as women sometimes do with men like that, worked to bring it out. She smiles at him again. The bunny flutters like a heart.
We’re talking about cookies and cremation when I figure out what’s wrong with Hector. He never laughs.
He’s straddling the tire swing and toeing whorls in the sand, deliberately reserved. The others are making a game of puns–their snickers vibrate like they’re being drawn across the ribs of a washboard. It’s my first epiphany...
In Pittsburgh, women carry large baskets of coins. They scatter the nickels, dimes, and quarters up and down the city streets, as if they’re sowing corn or oats or wildflower seeds. When they’ve finished, the women stoop and twist to gather the change back up again.
I yawned, stretched, and exited the master bath, thinking: It’s so nice to be able to keep the bathroom door open around a woman, and my ex-wife was flying above our bed. Technically, legally, it’s just my bed now except for twenty-nine minutes last night when we revisited well-explored territories. We knew it was wrong and confusing—discussed that openly while I sucked each one of her toes, ran the backs of my fingers along the insides of her thighs.
After she bought the house, there was a month of newness, of fresh, invigorating possibility, the feeling of Yes, why had she ever doubted? It is possible to begin again.
She also bought twenty legal pads and five boxes of pens, because she planned to keep a record of the chaos, from a chair in front of the window of her sixth story apartment. She’d positioned the chair already. She’d even stacked some blankets next to the chair for when the power went out and the radiators groaned and fell silent. She bought tarps, duct tape, caulk, and Plexiglas—things to repair the broken windows resulting from the inevitable explosions and stray bullets.
It’s a great neighborhood. It reminds me a lot of Brooklyn, but also kind of like the Mission mixed a little with Hoxton and the Left Bank, but without all the gross people we don’t like. I could totally live there.