Everyone has a story to tell that’s set inside a bar. I remember the long year I loved a boy from school, how every day at five o’clock we met at George’s Lounge, how we became familiar, the aging lady bartender calling out in her clear voice–Miller, Miller Lite– before that big door eased shut …
What I’m about to tell you is true. It was in the paper some few years back, but I’d forgotten until you asked about my sister, asked if I thought she was a pretty baby, asked if I’d taken good care of her. The answers are yes. She’s the one with the rich red hair, …
Someone more romantic might say it has to do with the rhythm of spoons, the toy piano sound of silverware tossed onto a table. Someone else might say it has to do with the way I move across the floor, my thick-hosed legs aching to be quick. All I can say is I like waiting …
Nobody knows where the boxes came from, only that they were always there, under the sink, stacked high in a corner of the closet–shoe boxes, shoe boxes everywhere. My mother wrapped her gifts in these–candies, hair ribbons, small sweaters… All I remember her giving me came in an old Stride Rite or Hush Puppy, the …
Has he called in the cats now, made certain all are accounted for, that their bellies are full, that they have not become food for coyotes come down into porch light for water? Is he reading a book under the cool warmth of our down comforter, clearing his throat between chapters as if he’d actually …
I eat powdered donuts from the box, the sugar dusting my denim shirt. He drives, sips coffee, fiddles with the radio. Anyone who sees us at a stop sign will think we’re comfortable, two middle-aged people out early. No one will know how unsettled we feel, how eager we are to fill our life with …
The man I love calls me doll, calls me baby. He phones me everyday, his sweet, sweet girl. Sometimes we talk about his mother, how she lost thousands on worthless coins she’d read about in the back of a magazine, how it makes him sad to think of her alone, wrapping the coins in doilies, …
I know what she’s going through. I know how anyone who’s loved a cat, allowed one to sleep against her face, allowed one to lay its full body along her outstretched legs until they go numb, can grieve for months. I once met a woman so attached to her cat she couldn’t imagine her house …