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...
My mother found me living a new life on an island off the coast of Maine where a lighthouse on a rocky finger of land sheltered my solitude. A society designed to preserve the past had offered me refuge in exchange for being present, for walking on floors and opening doors, for filling musty rooms with my breath. I was the lighthouse caretaker...
When I carved a rose the size of my palm to give to her, a sliver of stone flew into my right eye and carved it out. Well, I still had one eye and the feeling in two hands and heart. She allowed me to kiss her but nothing more.
He reeked of sweat and wine and rotting fish, and so did everyone else who sat shivering and trapped in the gristled black of the beast. The man squatted alone in his tweed rags to prod the thick shallows with a sharpened pole. He waited, silver-haired and asthmatic with his hands shaking and coralled over in splinters. He couldn't see a thing, there, in that sweating dark.
Miriam and Dorothy are just getting to be best girlfriends again. They hadn’t spoken for a while over a silly disagreement about some money Dorothy had loaned her. Then Charlie, Miriam’s second husband, got drunk and shot himself.
Her lips were in that famous downward turn, her eyes lowered and dreamy. She brought a delicate hand to her forehead and pushed a white-blond, perfect curl away from her cheek. Hers was the saddest face I’d ever seen.