Across the hall from me, Mr. Gates is having a wall installed in his room. He doesn’t need a new wall, and tries to explain this. He also tries to explain that he had plans to teach today, as opposed to suffering hammers and saws all day. The workmen respectfully listen. Gates is seven feet …
Words are turds so I don’t say a thing. I crawl back to my study, try to write Doctor Susan. I’m dying. Robert is at my throat. The word are misspelled, me on my knees using only one finger. Now the floor is sweeping me away, a magic carpet. Now I go limp, my head …
7 and I sign-in. I smile at the new secretary, Mrs. Dexter. She’s nice in a vacant sort of way. She’s got an IQ best described as unpretentious. I watch her type a letter. “deAr Msr. evans.” She has never used a computer, never even turned one on. She doesn’t answer the phone very well …
I’m crawling all over the house searching for my meds, still screaming like a child in a burning building. My brain is on fire. I can smell its stinky smoke like seared meat. Where are the firemen? Who’s going to save the very life my husband wants to kill? Should I call 911? No, too …
I have to turn in the weekly lesson plan that nobody reads, the one everybody knows nobody reads. But I got to do it anyway even though the district office hasn’t hired anyone to read lesson plans, and, even if they did, I don’t give a wank. It’s mandated. So I pretty much copy word-for-word the …
His hands are at my throat, choking me, slowly choking me to death. He’s squeezing me so hard I can hear my neck break–snap, snap, like a chicken bone. Will he pluck me, too? I see feathers, many bloody feathers on the ratty grey rug. Each of them has a bone in it, this I …
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination. — Ludwig Wittgenstein In the early 1980s I went to the Third Annual Conference on Computers and Writing. A well-known computer guru—can his name really have been Chip?—was the keynote speaker. Against expectation, he told us that across town they were …
Bones. Decapitations. The tip of the knife running down my jugular vein as if de-veining a shrimp. Bones, my bones, delicate as the spines of feathers, taped to paper, hung in old musty museums. The decapitation of my beloved, his face like that of an elephant gouged of its tusk, my fingers dabbing the blood …