A projector screen lit up in the front of the cavernous room, and the teacher told us to pay attention. There was a white tower in the center of the screen. An announcer’s voice droned, counting down by seconds.
Grocery stores are problematic. Butchers shrink wrap pairs of salmon steaks, slap on gold foil labels that say “Dinner for Two.”
Robert turns to me—he and I sit at the Saloon’s long bar with unopened Pabst tall boys in our hands. We’ve sat here many days already.
I slouched at the end of the exam table in the crepe-paper robe, and to avoid crying uncontrollably, I spoke ill of my sister-in-law: “She’s an 18-year old dropout and just had a baby.”
You slid a daisy stem behind your ear. We were fifteen, and you were well, and your bangs were always in your face.
Hiking long ago along Paradise’s flowering meadows, I found a broken-winged butterfly stuck to the spring mud.
An elderly woman trapped in a nursing home called and said, “Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?” “Yeah, Mama, somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday.”
I wanted to stand in the potential of harm’s way, feel closer than the breadth of this shared water allowed.
“I dreamed rain,” she said, sitting up in the bed. | “It’s raining outside. Chucking it down. Must have got into your dream.”
My father came home every night with a pack of Pall Malls in his shirt pocket, beer on his breath and several rubber bands around his wrist.
