I should start by saying that I began this day by washing a pair of panties in the kitchen sink. It was a result of indecision: either I didn’t have enough money or I didn’t have enough time to go to Launderama. Maybe that’s beside the point.
Mark and I sat on my porch and watched the fire go. That said, the porch was the steps leading up to my apartment and the fire was in a garbage can. While we were confused, the tourists were excited, walking around gawking but moreso smiling at what they thought was “real New York.”
“How awesome! A trash can bonfire,” said one guy in a collared shirt, drinking an iced coffee through a straw and pointing even though his blonde companion was already looking. Everyone was already looking, before the fire started, even. Everyone was always looking at garbage cans. I only vaguely knew why.
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I tell her that she has a sick predisposition for the nearly dead, I think, because as usual we’re eating in a diner that looks like a mortuary prep room, full of the yellowing papyrus-skins of tough old matrons and veined reedy sparse everywhere husbands, some now husbands only retrospectively, and I want to know why she chooses this in a city where diners and diner-ees can be as bohemian as you’ve ever wanted them?
I can’t stomach those other places, Mimi says, and eats an entire burger nearly rare, or maybe the ketchup lake she drowned it in is what’s dripping out of the bun. Even the waiters here stumble heavily while they carry the Lunches of the Living Dead, which is exactly what’s inspirational, she says. I think it’s an inspiration to eat somewhere else, but Mimi only wants to go back to her apartment and have sex on the leather couch in the living room, which turns out all right because halfway through we fall from the couch and onto the rug. Sex on the couch is generally uncomfortable because the couch is summer sticky even in November but her boyfriend’s on the bed writing and does not want to be distracted. When he comes into the kitchen to get a glass of water I am scalding my hands at the sink and I tell him hello. It was my dad, I think, who told me the best thing to do in these situations is to be unfailingly polite, though I’m not really sure of the nature of this situation or what degree—version—of politeness is appropriate. I fumble with the faucet and splash him accidentally, but he doesn’t mind anyway because he is, I’ve been told, an interesting person.
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In an alley walking home I met Shakespeare. Only he had inhabited the body of the orange Cingular mascot. He’s been doing this for the last couple months to veil his identity. It’s the reason there are theories that he was a fraud.
He gave me a new manuscript he’d been working on. I stuffed it in my backpack and turned around to leave. There are never any words when we meet. As I walked back into the street, I faced back to see if he had left yet. There was an orange outfit lying on the ground like a Cingular guy shed his skin.
I got home and opened the manuscript. It was titled “I knew there would be a day when I would regret not buying a couch for my office. This is that day.” After reading it I threw it in the fireplace. He doesn’t like when I try to publish his stuff. He’s in his Emily Dickinson phase.
He wrote me a short note on the back page which I kept though: “We are like dreamers (until we reach Jerusalem). And tell Bob Dylan that I neither don pointed shoes nor converse with French girls.”
It was a beautiful summer. We spent our days in front of the television and our nights kissing boys we barely knew. But every time, we came home and we were virgins again. We weren’t sisters, but we weren’t just friends. I would call us lovers, but we did not love.
We would go out to the point where there was no more light and just stare up at the stars. Venus, Jupiter, Mars. Canes Major, Canes Minor, The Milky Way. We told each other secrets without even speaking a word.
My best friend, at sixteen, was a goddess. She could make the moon bow at her feet, and walk upon water as if it were glass. She would disappear for days at a time before coming home in a burst of light, diamonds dripping from her fingertips.
Sometimes, we would run through the forest like a pack of wolves, hungry for the hunt, hungry for the kill, hungry for a sense of emptiness we could never quite find.
She could hear the music of the stars, the vibrations of God. All I could do was see the clouds cover our world in a blanket of forgotten words. She danced like a crazy woman around the fire to the heartbeat of the jungle, and all I could do was watch because I did not believe in the spirit of joy.
I didn’t want to know her tricks; she never offered to share.
A Pastiche of Junot Diaz’s “Alma”
You have a boyfriend named Andy, with crazily defined shoulders and the team jacket to compliment them. And he’s a popular guy. You love hanging off his arm, and driving around in his car. Andy likes how you never fight, and how well you give a blowjob.
Andy is a state school, cocky, football-playing kid, without whom you might never have lost your virginity. He’s not at the D1 university, but he got a good scholarship to the second rate school, and he kicks field goals all fall to the tune of half the cost of tuition. Andy spends every weekend with his stupid teammates and you wonder what he’s doing when you’re at your liberal artsy college upstate. He’s going through an I miss you phase, because Christmas Break is coming up and he wants to make sure he covers his bases, insuring he’ll get his dick wet.
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You asked me to explain how I have been feeling lately, I told you: “I am a lion and I roar insecurities.” I am a girl and you are still a bird. How can we defy Mother? Sometimes I reunite with my vision of you in the dark and I steal the truth
to make songs. This is my hook: I see you and I see the end. Peel my skin and out fly moths. If I bleed heterocera then you shit light posts. All of this talk about high fives makes me feel incomplete. I am not a bird today, so here, if you want it, you can take a low five.
And when it came down to it, he knew everything about himself was a cliché, the pigpen room with sour-caked pipes, the wet pizza boxes, the turpentine cocktail he sipped from a martini glass at this, his lowest. It was all in good fun until every bit of it seemed so ordinary, and then the self-loathing scabbed over. He’d pick at it, pick at it until it was time to rip it off and bleed out. Checking the ol’ ticket in this, a room where every skittering cockroach, every expended condom was a dire reminder that there was not a shit to be given.
“The image will be complete if I die sucking on my bong,” he thought. A kidney went as he lit the crusty thing up.
It bothered him that when his grisly remains were found later everyone would know he was such a slob, so he decided that his last action may as well be doing the dishes. Stomach wasn’t too pleased when he stood. A cap gun pop from inside and some blood on the undies.
“Jeez,” he said, to no one.
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Circles in his eyes widened, as do city limits, to accommodate the area he saw himself diminish in. He shouted he tested positive. Javier stood 6’ 4’’. Weighed over 250 lbs. His face was wide and heavy. His ankles seemed larger than his knees. The noise woke the birds. No longer dreaming they flew to less familiar heights in the city. The crowd opened its eye on Javier. Any one disappointment so often suggested the man’s larger failings in life. They let him pass and he escaped into the Old City.
The public history of the Old City consisted of its stonework, half-completed projects, a public garden of vines mixed with weeds, bridges disappearing into sand. In this neighborhood one was never sure, as in Javier’s life, of a thing’s beginning or its decline. I called Javier’s ex to help me find him. Night fell. My vision was weak. Black spots hoof-printed through sand in my eyes. Cells behind the retina, Javier’s doctor had reassured me. I kept looking. Turned down another street. Sounds became muffled. I turned the corner and I saw the man. Javier’s ex was massive. When he appeared, cars drove slower. Children climbed higher in the trees. Sand blew higher in the sky, audible against the wind.
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