A small antique shop built of brown, weathered clapboard. Inside, for sale, an old typewriter. Caught in its dusky roller, a sheet of paper with a poem by James Wright typed onto it. But no: on second glance, no paper at all.
My uncles have raised me ever since my widowed mother ran away from Break-A-Leg and left me behind. Josiah is all business and worms. Obediah is unpredictable and moody. It’s hard to tell whether he’ll yank me off my feet and waltz me across the boggy ground, or whether he’ll have one of his tantrums about waste and warmongering. He’s got a glass eye that he likes to pop in and out when he’s thinking hard about something.
The bus. Early morning to set the scene. Think about the sun in the morning like that. Like it’s just like barely you know? Like it’s soft. Anyway there were two people on it when I got on, a dude dressed like the Grim Reaper with a six-pack in his lap...
It’s frosty in the air and on the ground, a dry frost that crackles and crunches under the feet and feels like the breaking of a stale communion wafer...
After Florencia’s funeral I walked down Avenida Mérida to Paco’s Cantina to toast the passing of the whore who took my virginity more than forty years before.
His father was a disgraced steamboat pilot with a knack for grounding boats and destroying docks, his mother the thin-lipped illegitimate daughter of a beefy prostitute. When the midwife handed him over, she waited six hours in the parlor room to be paid, her queries up the decrepit stairs returned only by the newborn’s trembling squalls...
The Princess of Pop remembered being a kid back in Louisiana on her cousins’ wide wooden swing, climbing so high that with one release of the chain links she might sail off into the clouds...