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Lackluster

Her momma used to sing Robert Johnson and Billie Holiday around the apartment in layers of turquoise and black fabric, crocheted chiffon. Arms floating, serpentine and feathery, alongside a voice that warbled like a caged bird. This is what Elyse tells you after reshaping the foam leaf in her cappuccino into one of Dali’s melting clocks. Slow sips.

Records of Middleton

Grant Scott hadn’t meant to stay so late that cold winter night, but with all the layoffs there certainly were plenty of things not getting done that had to be. Blades to be washed, floors to be swept, accounts to be balanced, doors to be locked. Of course, it helped that production was down, but it was tiring none the less.

City Limits

The window of the bar had a view of urban verticality. Steel buildings—rewrapped every ten minutes by black bus exhaust—stretched north and south cutting off any view to the sky they supposedly scraped. Converted warehouses turned swanky lofts shared sidewalks and walls with rundown motels and flophouses. People in the mix walked here in silk ties, in ripped up jeans with doped up pockets while newspapers kicked around in the city’s wind tunnels.

The Kitchen

Carni was by no means a gourmand and her kitchen in the small, aluminum sided house did not inspire much. The smoker’s-teeth wallpaper flitted at its edges with each oscillation of the seasonal space fans and heaters that failed to adequately circulate the smell of Freon and beer through the mildewed hallways. Despite this scene, she had in that kitchenette dabbled in the midwestern art of the casserole and so the oven aromas sometimes cut through the dank stench of the place.

Happy Easter

“In the spirit of the holiday, would you care for a Cadbury egg?”

Coffee and Clocks

White chocolate caramel mocha impressions. The girl sits in a copper chair stained green from prolonged exposure to oxygen. She is next to the window of the coffee shop; so close to the window, in fact, that there is a circle of fog from her breath on the tinted glass by her left shoulder. Her breath smelled of white chocolate caramel mocha with skim milk, no whipped cream; substituting 2% milk with skim milk.

The Last Door

It was not long ago that I called my home Number 111 of E. Priory Street, Exeter, Massachusetts. It was a squalid little hole, yet my income bade me suffer the extremities of wintry cold and summer heat, and the peculiar folk who answered for my neighbours. I was a writer then, and I suppose I might fancy myself as such now, though my publishers give me dreadful accounts of what few books I have written.

Homemade

Last year I spent the Fourth of July across the kitchen table from my mother counting the number of shots she could swallow before the sobbing began. My applause started around number ten, she laughed, and with an impish smile motioned for me to bring her the full bottle that was meant for the next morning. Who could blame her, we were having so much fun. So, I unscrewed the top and pretended to take a good long swig even grimacing with bliss.

The Shriners Circus Girl

When Ginger was nine years old, a man in a remarkably shiny white Trans-Am pulled up and offered her a ride. She was walking home from jazzercise with her best friend. They were practicing for a small talent act they had been asked to do in the upcoming circus. After she and her friend had parted ways, Ginger continued practicing their routine along the sidewalk. She was wearing a striped aqua and purple leotard, layered with fringe, and glittery leg warmers on her scrawny, long legs.

A Dull Brown

Somewhere, on the great plains of the Midwest there is a field as vast as the formidable reaches of the imagination can fathom. On a winter day, hoarfrost covers the wheat here, and the clouds, gray and somber, drape the warm earth with a wet plane of sadness. Such a place reflects the men who work it, silent with dull gray hair and without the rosy blossom that a cold west wind usually paints on the cheeks. Neither life nor death permeates the air.