children.

there's an archway between wings of mckay, where the door is. it's about five paces or something. there's a daycare out towards the parking lot, and every other day the kids get taken out on a stroll on the campus. going by mckay is first, so the archway is very exciting. they think it's a tunnel and when they go under it they make as much noise as possible to hear the echo (though there's not really one). so around 10:30 many mornings one hears a group of little voices going "LALALALALA!" it was annoying as hell at first, but I look forward to it now.

oh that man.

One eye was made of a pinwheel. Not a spinning toy that protruded out from his face, of course, but rather a tiny spinning wheel inserted into the eye-shaped socket.

joey

And then her heart exploded, and love went everywhere. It dripped from the ceiling, soaked into the floor, stained the curtains. it ran into the street, richocheted from the buildings, flooded the beaches, enveloped all of them in its permanence; love love love.

him and her and you and me

He did not make use of the dead horse’s remains. He considered them useless, tainted by evil. A beautiful horse, like the other three, he himself had named it, Big Joe, after himself, a kinda joke, but it was dead now and that really didn’t matter. Dad Sir was no longer around to tell him not to waste resources, to tell him what was right, so Joseph vowed to move on instinct. From the moment he saw Dad Sir in a pile, fallen and broken and trampled, he knew things were going to be different. He did not cry, it was not something Dad Sir would have wanted, and Lord knows Ma was doing enough of that for the both of them- for anyone in the whole world.

After seeing after Dad Sir’s burial the only logical thing to do was kill Big Joe. Big, beautiful Joe—he knew what was coming to him. He took it like a condemned prisoner, like one of the men Joseph’d seen hung in town, when they used to live in town.

love in a fishing village

The water seems to sympathize, its soft curves look inviting as they embrace and pass through the boat, every wave that follows seems to be perfectly in time as he hears it hit the side. He will always be a fisherman. The rhythm of the sea lulls him, assures him; he will never go home. His love is too big for harbor village. The waves crash in time with his thoughts, coming together and breaking apart, they seem to be saying the same thing, over and over as the boat is pulled deeper into the dark night.

I love you, I loved you.

funeral home

The three of them sat there, each feeling as though they were sharing a surreal moment, one they would look back on from time to time like a memory one keeps in a shoebox- an object like a marble or a penny or an eraser shaped like a penguin. There was something so timely about their appearance, their togetherness, their almost perfectly symmetric alignment- two plus one people perfectly positioned on a bus stop. Justine didn’t want to look at either of her benching contemporaries, as a matter of fact- she wanted to believe that their expressions matched hers, that they were at that moment indeed the three wise monkeys; partaking in no evil.

the town of fopstein and mr. bailey

He had a dream. One of those odd dreams where you see yourself doing something, but you are also the one doing it? One of those ones. In it, he had created a person, a beautiful Tin Man with round rolly legs and square body- a Tin Man who could move and speak and answer questions.

election virginity

The fall breeze was heavy with the weight of promises whispered on the winds, sent from the pulpits, called down on us from the giant televisions that seemed to be everywhere on campus. Everywhere seemed to be Election Land, but on campus it was positively inescapable. Even with the surprise of rain over Halloween weekend the posters remained, now with a sort of gritty character as their giant letters bled red white and blue and their faces sagged. Bulletins, wrapped in plastic and attached to sticks, were planted in the ground and in every dorm hallway hand written signs clung to the walls, urging all to the TV-clad study rooms to watch the action unfold. The staunch-looking, elderly conservative or the slick, refreshing democrat? Who would the nation choose to lead us now? We college kids had it figured out, for the most part.

puritans!!!!!

Generally speaking, you know what bothers me about puritans? They entice you with promises of non-alcoholic glee, and then once you've joined their cult they tell you what you're going to do-- nothing fun, that's what. They make you go to your hovel and wear grey dresses. Especially if you're a little boy. Nothing says puritanical like little boys in grey dresses. That's what the Oft Quoted Puritan says, anyway.

peter

Peter, or Pete as he was called in his younger years (which seemed so far away now even though it hadn’t been a decade since he was in school), was a very tall man. This was one thing he always had going for him when it came to women, with the high demand of tall gentleman and all. Peter considered this to be an indication of the possibility that women themselves were growing progressively taller, sometimes even before men could catch up. Peter was a believer in evolutionary theory. Anyway, Peter’s height was always something to be thankful for as his looks were otherwise lacking. He had the sort of face that seemed perpetually sad or stupefied by life. Never very expressive or humorous, Peter was often lost in the shuffle of interesting people that so seemed to outshine him most of his life. He didn’t mind it, for the most part. Patiently, Peter waited for his chance to do something really interesting- he knew he wasn’t a grand talent but he believed, earnestly, that everyone had their moment. However, 31 years went by and “that moment” just never seemed to make itself known.

At the age of 32 Peter made the decision to construct a guillotine in his backyard with which he planned to kill himself.

a hot day in california

It was the hottest day in recent memory. Hot days in Southern California are always confusing because you never feel them coming, and once you adjust to them they’re gone. This hot day was probably due to the Santa Ana’s, though Mel didn’t know their pattern or when they were prime to strike, but still, when the weather was like this, the Ana phenomenon seemed to pop up in conversation. Mel hated hot weather, it made her entirely uncomfortable and reminded her of Oklahoma and Arizona and all those places she preferred to forget. It made her more unfocused than usual, her concentration issues became far more extreme and, even with the window open, when she sat down with the promise of finishing the writing project she had been working on all week all she ended up with was falling asleep.

Needful Things

As if his feet were aflame, he dashes past me and up the stairs. I follow him, cautiously; I have seen him like this before. When I find him he is writing furiously with a sharpie marker over the stacks of paper that I keep beside my bed. Rapidly he tears through them, one by one, etching grand words over them and destroying them in one fail swoop. I pick them up to unfold them. "Fetching" reads one, "rollercoasters," reads the other.