flash

We meet at a restaurant with dusty wine bottles from places we still cannot pronounce stacked high up the walls. A carafe of pinot grigio between us. We grown now.

Elizabeth White is white like her name. First time in our Bengali-medium, central-Calcutta school American woman is teaching. She is volunteer only. Come here, teach English one month and go. They’re trying many-many things for making students speak English. Posters here-there in the corridor: No English, No Future.

Just before the worst blizzard since ’86, knowing full well it was coming, I walked to South Station and took the Number Four bus two hours through the pre-blizzard traffic to the address Pete had given me…

Your friend tells you over the phone. She wants you to know what you are facing. You take the knowledge from her calmly, like accepting a small white box. The weight of knowing balances in your hands.

The preacher in his black suit leans over my grandmother in her hospital bed and prays. He wrings his hands and asks for healing mercies and Thy will be done and intervention in a low but high-pitched whisper.

In the white-walled room there was an exhibit of photos of people being suffocated, and visitors wandered in and stared at them. Some people regretted coming and wanted to leave after a minute.

There’s a sad werewolf on my balcony. He broke up with his werewolf boyfriend—Gregov, an awkwardly lanky wolf who’s a bit of a flirt. This crying Lycan said he’s a vegetarian, but he’s munching on bacon out of the bag.

Aileen sits across from a brown butter cake with strawberry jam filling and strawberry buttercream frosting. The savory plus the soft make it the perfect potential spouse; all she has to do is cut in.

They wanted to meet a ghost. Sam said they had to add the adjective benevolent if they didn’t want trouble. Sandy didn’t believe in unbenevolent ghosts.

My shower’s so gross I’ve been hooking up with people to use theirs.

Whoring myself out for a clean shower is a new low. Worse than not having an actual trash can, just a bag hung over a cabinet door. I used to be humiliated about the trash bag situation. Now it’s a high-water mark.

You probably remember it different. You probably remember the sun being so hot we had to close the shades in the middle of the day—that the AC couldn’t keep up, that the floors were sticky. The pizza ovens didn’t help. You probably remember it was the hottest day on record.

Frankie dies and comes back to haunt him. She hadn’t seen him in years when they were alive, hadn’t thought of him since maybe that time someone on TV had a name like his.

Watch out for shirts with horizontal stripes, Abuelita says, because you’re too fat and it looks bad. Best to choose shirts with more slimming patterns. Vertical lines. Solid blacks, nothing lighter than gray. This shirt is O.K., she says, draping it over her ironing board, because the vertical lines pop out.

I loved a bastard. He was awful sometimes but also his parents never married, a true bastard. When we met he was holding a radioactive drink and I wanted to lap it from his hand.

Over half the string is swallowed, its remaining twenty feet coiled in the man’s lap. He’s skinny, this would-be yogi, his flesh taut about his ribs, sunburnt and flaking. It’s been years since he fashioned the string from a long strip of cloth—twisted it into a braid and knotted it every five inches.

Andrea tells me this part of Florida is known for its white sand beaches—not like the trashier Atlantic side with its brown sand, murky waters, and medical waste. I tell her it must also be known for air so thick and yewmid (I say it how Andrea pronounces it) that a minute outside of our air-conditioned condo is an asthma attack.

When he dreams now, all of his dreams seem tied to food, and all of the food is tied to memory. And the dreams he remembers most clearly are the ones that go back a long way, to the farthest jurisdictions of memory. Back to when he was a boy in Augusta, short enough to pass beneath the counter without bumping his head.

When my mother says it’s nice to see me again I know she means her love for me could fill a lake, because when she told me she left a lizard in my room it was a crocodile…

Caitlin enunciates the words mother and kitchen and mopping like each syllable has scrubbing properties, like she’s flossing with vowels, cleaning her mouth out for Mr. Gilcrest, our drama teacher. She hopes he’ll notice her A-plus-elocution and become her love slave.

x got off the c train & plodded through the port authority doors around 8 // the line at au bon pain snaked all the way to the pay phones on the wall // but it seemed to be going fast //

Things had gone bad, and toilet paper was out of the budget. Luckily, Griff's place was a quick walk from Walmart. At any hour he could crash in, deliver a clenched hello to the greeter, and, a few steps later, void himself in a corporate environment. No men's room door, just a labyrinthine entryway; no paper towels, just weapons-grade blowers; and best of all, no questions. 

When you're a failure at everything else, write a novel. That was the first line of my novel, spoken by Dorian Vandercleef—musician, artist, and social provocateur. My main character would never achieve fame, but I was confident this novel was my ticket to literary stardom.

If Tara hadn’t crossed the rope bridge that bounced over the dry creek, she wouldn’t have agreed to go whitewater rafting with David and her camp counselor and the camp counselor’s girlfriend with the long, red highlights. Tara wouldn’t have laughed after the water roared in her face and the cold clapped away her breath.

Although he has observed her in the hallway before (usually sporting white earphones, cord trailing to the iPhone in her back jeans’ pocket), today is different because she also clutches a notebook, the expensive kind (what is it called? mole something?) he saw on a Barnes & Noble display a few weeks earlier while shopping with his parents, and observing this girl again

Mom worried that Gertie didn’t have any friends. Gertie never asked to go to someone’s house, and the avocado green phone that hung next to the refrigerator never rang for her. She didn’t talk about other kids from school. She didn’t talk much period.

"Your parents told me I could have a pool party on my last night,” Lori said.

She finished rubbing baby oil into her legs and spritzed her hair with Sun-In. I treaded water. My parents hired Lori to look after me so they could “work on their marriage” in Hawaii …

Here is Lacy in the Snacks aisle of the drugstore, a cornucopia of sweet and savory goodness. Here are the enticing rows of potato chips, corn chips, pretzels, cookies, cakes. Here are the brightly lit refrigerators with their myriad juices and colas and wine coolers.

Back in Minnesota, my mother is preparing to preach a sermon to her conservative congregation about how it is God's plan for us to welcome Muslims into our communities in no uncertain terms. She fully expects to be booed out of the pulpit and possibly fired, but she is doing it because she knows it is right.

It’s a shameful thing to discover your ten-year-old stepson sucking face with his foot-tall Princess Amidala doll. In broad daylight. For anyone walking by his room to see. I’m quiet at first; I’m not here to give the kid a complex.

It was at exactly 2: 22 Mountain Time when all the dogs started barking and howling, no growling, no whining, and the Light Sleepers woke first, and started yelling hush, and the more Concerned Sleepers got out of bed to see why their dogs were barking…

That night, I heard the sound of someone being killed. Not simply dying, being killed. It was a scraping, metal sound. I was the last to leave work that night, locking the back door behind me.

Picture this: you go to drinks with Mr. Clean. You’re attracted to him—he’s serious, quiet, laughs softly at your jokes. “We could go back to my place,” you say. Mr. Clean nods, not that enthusiastically. He’s playing it cool.

We Californians don’t know volcanoes, at least not the active kind. We don’t appreciate the viscosity of molten lava, for instance. We can’t distinguish between lava and magma, though we’re fairly certain either one can kill you.

Put the brush down for one goddamn second, her father says. But she doesn’t. She won’t. She stands by the kitchen window and pulls the brush through her hair, thick and wavy, the glory of it all fanning behind her in the sunlight like a mermaid’s.

I am standing on the corner in my blue flannel nightgown that I’ve had since high school, waiting for the bus to come in. Cesar is on that bus, I know it. I saw him get on at Geary and Van Ness when he switched from the 28-Geary downtown to the 43-Van Ness to the beach.

Harrison watches as the woman on the screen arches her back and plumps her behind into the air. He delights in the suppleness of her exposed breasts, of the nipples that sit taut in a whisper of cotton candy pink, of her hair: a shock of blonde cut sharply at the chin. She wears nothing more than straps that wrap around her thighs and peak at her hips.

It’s a wedding where I run into my ex. I’m on one of those awkward one-date-onlys with a plain girl named Brittany, and Maggie looks amazing.

Congratulations on the purchase of your Gower & Knightcross EasyDawn 200™ Alarm Clock with AM/FM/MP3 wake tones and customizable lighting options. CAUTION: Lamp becomes hot! Do not place any object on top of lamp.

Becca lost her head when the elephant came to town. Five stories tall and made of metal with a horned eyeless head, the elephant tried not to knock down buildings but knocked down buildings anyway.

This time it wasn’t a drill. Crouched beneath our desks in our third grade classroom, window shades pulled down as a deterrent against thermonuclear radiation, I heard the lone Russian bomber elude our jet fighters, flying so far above them that I could imagine our machine gun bullets drifting up at it like a shower of soft windblown raindrops.

You arrive a bit late, trying to be polite, giving Margaret extra time to prepare, but you are last and your carefully selected bottle of cabernet franc will not be enjoyed. Twin bottles of Bogle chardonnay and merlot are already open on the buffet, and mellow Margaret greets your entrance with enthusiasm.

During our brief time together, Brandon made one accurate statement. Almost everything that came out his mouth-his political conspiracy theories, soliloquies of the ego, the tales about fistfights and shady dealings he thought I’d find sexy as hell-was bullshit.

It was an accident. An accident? It was the steady ground suddenly tilting into the steep sides of a gorge, and the shitty path and its shitty cracks turned into crumbling rock giving way under shittier shoes, the ones that were going to be thrown out and replaced with the new season because these had paid their dues and there was supposed to be just enough traction for a few more weeks of Weather, before Weather gave way to Heat.

There’s a girl on the softball team in love with her bat. You see them together, in the storage room. You hear her whispers, hear her sighs. She says you can’t tell anyone. Says she’ll break your fingers if you do.

She woke up thinking carpet. It had fallen out of fashion, she knew. Everyone wanted hardwood floors these days. But now carpet seemed like the right idea, the cure, the fix, so obvious that it was embarrassing.

The honeymoon year was a home-cooking adventure, joyful domesticity inside Storybook cottage. They cooked love notes for each other in the form of casseroles. The couple lost The Magic quickly though.

In the morning we split up the MDMA we stole from Todd’s older brother between the four of us. We thought it was MDMA. It looked a lot like the picture we saw on Erowid so we figured we’d be okay but sure enough we were all staring at the mounds of white powder in front of us, unsure how to consume it, when Todd said we were going to be late for our last day of high school.

My son comes for a rare visit on his horse — contemplate the gall of it. He ties off to my mailbox. Destrier stamps marigolds; it looks like the End Times have started in my yard. “Come in, son,” I say, and pat his back with a half­hug. He pushes a paper bag into my hands.

She makes a game out of hiding the bottles in the woods. Her father goes to work building whatever building needs building that week, sometimes driving as far out as Sullivan County down old M12. L puts down her book—her father likes to see her reading, let him know he's done this one thing right—and tiptoes into the kitchen. She doesn't need to be quiet but that's part of what makes it like a game.

A boy in my high school showered three times a day. He wore sunglasses inside and had sex with my best friend. Their families vacationed in Florida at the same time.

The year after their baby died, they sold their furniture, her skis, his table saw. Then they donated most of their clothes. They asked to see tiny houses, no larger than 500 square feet. “Bill and I are buying a house on wheels,” Amanda told their families. “We’re going to travel like gypsies.”

I received your letter two months after marrying Mike. The letter was printed in blue Courier font and the graphics were abysmal.

Maybe he shouldn’t call her that. Too girly. A diminutive pet name focusing on what she looks like. Too old fashioned, he worries, something not for girls anymore these days, something his parents’ or grandparents’ generation would have said alongside white picket fences and a green, well-manicured lawn, the station wagon in the driveway, its cargo top filled with the colors of summer escapes. She’s more than that.

After supper, we took the kids down to the road next to Bryson's Pond to see the body. Picture ran in yesterday's paper of the accident. The kind of thing that makes news in our small town: smashed up car with the hood rammed through the interior and door sheared off, its body leaning against the telephone pole like a drunk too afraid to take another step.

A cop car pulled up next to me as I stood at the crosswalk of the empty intersection, on an empty summer night. I heard the static of dispatch through the car’s open window.

In bleached out archival footage that never really existed, I learn about Amelia Earhart. I see her tear-scrunched face held together in a blindfold on some island that happened to catch her little propeller plane that couldn’t quite. For whatever reason, it just couldn’t quite.

Samantha and I are both “the babies” when we play house. Samantha has better dolls, so we stage our house in her bedroom. Her closet doors are mirrored, and so when we play house, it’s like there are four of us—Samantha, Samantha’s twin, me, my twin—and when we skip and dance and laugh, we multiply even more.

Mom loved that eagle cam so bad. She watched it like she watched NASCAR and Seinfeld in the 90s. Two feet from the screen and both hands in a bag of Martins. All day she stayed glued.

Great. Now you’re crying in the middle of giving a blowjob. Luckily, Steve the engineer isn’t paying attention to your face. With a mouthful of his cock, and one of your hands pumping double time, he better be completely transported.

T-SRB, the one-time unrepeatable success of simple-to-complex mechanics and anti-oxidation aerosols, rubber gaskets and greased bearings, runs entirely by the perpetual-motion heart. Estimated half-life: six-thousand years.

The pipe bomb will be eight inches in length, two inches in diameter. It will contain shards of broken glass, some nails, a few screws. It will be born after Jimmy Reed has one bad day too many, after Matt Lacey hip-checks him face-first into his locker, after the right lens of Jimmy’s glasses cracks and the frame bends and the air vents scrape his sideways-turned head, drawing blood.

Dean keeps asking me hypotheticals. Takes swigs of vodka and raises his pool cue for another shot. “How ‘bout you were in a day-old toilet, and shit is all you have to eat. Would you eat it or would you rather die?” I take my turn and tell him if he asks me one more question I will pose my own, and he won't like his choice between death and death.

Many years ago, my wife and I were living in New York City together making landscape drawings. We were squatting in this abandoned apartment, so whatever money we made we spent on movies and food. We had a friend who worked at an art house cinema, and she gave us free popcorn—we saw lots of foreign movies and bad student films.

Things were almost over between us, but we didn't know that. It was a mild December. You needed help moving your belongings from the dorm to your parents' house for the holidays. We spent a whole half-hour sorting and discarding the minefield of your car.

She peeled an orange and found an avocado, the sort of week it had been. The feel of buttery green on her tongue failed to be what she needed as she ate it. Between trips to the cleaners, the library, the morgue, she held her hands steady on the wheel— the grip of an adult, certain and not trembling, her gaze definitely not looking left at the swish of angels, their wings like a coat of rain across the grass.

No one I know has ever been to Taliaferro County, so I don’t believe it’s real. There is data out that says it has 1,700 or so residents and I’ve never met a single one. The closest I’ve come is I found a couple guys in a bar in Atlanta one night who said they owned a few thousand acres in Taliaferro between the two of them.

That part of me yet unclaimed the girl’s body before the baby before the boy before the first opening my fingers my hands I want that skin that soft unscarred belly those breasts not yet bursting suns I want that body back I want her…

Smack me with what you know, baby, I’m asking for it. Make those ten dollar words zip like a switch, make that jargon sizzle. Sting me with words you can correctly pronounce so I’ll stop suspecting you don’t know as much as you think you do.

They lived in Indiana together in a red, brick house. A famous writer lived there before them and left a signed map of New York City taped over the solid Midwestern writing desk. They wrote in bed, on the second story of the house. They began thousands of stories they never finished, Lucky Dragon, Going to Colorado, a whole host of aborted voyages.

When the caterpillar is crawling in the dish, do not measure it with your ruler. Do not classify it according to the phases of growth illustrated in the chart in your book. These were the things of seventh grade. Now you are in eight grade and must interact with the caterpillar on a new level.

Outside was a man {had she seen him before?}. A non-descript man. He could have been any man. When she answered the door, it was about three seconds before he threw a vile lie in her face {a vial of lye}.

Yesterday, Marilyn from the web team brought me lunch from Snyder’s deli and I had to ask, What’s up? as if I did not know what her weekly check-in would bring me.

That time my dad took me camping by the Eel River at the Fortuna KOA. As we lay under the stars with the fire dying, he told me people eat spiders in their sleep—hundreds in a lifetime. They crawl toward the smell. “Don’t be a mouth-breather,” he said, and then he rolled over.

Because of him, she bought her first pair of thong underwear. She paints her sad, short fingernails. She looks at the mirror as he fucks her from behind, wondering about her ass. Cellulite? Ingrown hair? She takes action, exfoliating, sweating in the sauna, hours of exercise.

We double-dutched in seventh grade and beat the girls from room 209 to win that trophy made of wire hangers and cardboard then went for pizza, grease sliding off the cheese like syrup. We chewed the rim of Styrofoam cups, spitting at one another and laughing. Then from our identical porches only a few feet away, I saw the pink and black thread from your friendship bracelet coming undone.

You can spend your time in the card aisle, but it’ll most likely just be wasted. There’s not much solace in those cards, not much heart or feeling or sincerity. Just little words like “Sorry” or “Condolences” that just translate to “I didn’t take the time before and I can barely be bothered now.”

“Well, what about tomorrow after lunch,” she suggested, squinting up at him even with her sunglasses on. He was tall and she liked that. He was looking somewhere beyond her, over her left shoulder though his body was turned toward her close enough, she could tell he was looking at the three women who had just walked by them, she could still see their silhouettes in his glasses.

Led Zeppelin has a history in my pants. They’ve lived and migrated all up and down my bra and underwear. They took up residence up in my pants when I was a heaping 14-year-old, crossing over from Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, to make a passage backward in time with the drop of the needle on vinyl.

Even if it means no nachos, I don’t want to do any more of that hateful teaching! People who have never done any teaching seem to have difficulty understanding how I feel about this. Jesus, I’m drunk as a stolen hard drive. My hands are crying.

Jude discharges liquid through her mouth all morning. She suffers from the opposite of motion sickness—she can’t handle the stillness. I take her to the mountains to find the longest, the curviest road. A road that starts and stops without expectation.

I don’t think Ferdinand should make any decisions about what to do with his life today. Nor should Mother. I, on the other hand, am no longer young and vital, and if I don’t make any decisions, they will certainly be made for me.

The obsession started when he was young. Coke cans. We were never sure why. They had to be Coke Classics, and they had to come from an Atlanta bottling plant. It took seven hundred and ninety-three to completely fill his wall space, an odd number because he left a spot for his light switch.

One late summer evening, the air had finally cooled and a Twain-ish kind of peace was aloft on the breeze. I decided to go for a walk and clear my mind before retiring. While & within my steps, I looked up and remembered how beautifully clear heaven can be.

Scott was so literal. We told him “break a leg” before he went on stage, and then he fell down the prop stairs and snapped his tibia in two places. The show didn’t go on for Scott. He was taken by ambulance to Riverside Community, and his understudy had to stuff his hair under a skin cap quick.

My mother says that she was young too, once upon a time. She says this in the cold dressing room of a department store the day before we leave for our last trip overseas. The people around us smell strong, like the babysitter she just fired who used so much perfume my nose hurt and kept frying bacon I wasn’t allowed to eat.