That American Life

She sang, ‘In the middle of a dream I call your name. Oh Yoko!’ as she crossed an empty parking lot under the sun. Integrity plagued her at unexpected turns. Running a nail over the metal cord casing, she realized she hadn't understood it could mean different things. Like the first degree of freshness, she'd thought it also the last. Payphone pressed to her ear, she squeezed her eyes closed, held her breath and imagined the world at the other end of the line.

Exile and a query to the cottonwoods in the backyard

Would she dream again of that alien house of her childhood, sealed like a spaceship with its white noise humming air conditioning as she drifted through the grey twilight of predawn, wrapped in an old yellow floral sheet for a kimono and of tucking her bare feet beneath her on the cool, soft sofa and fixing her eyes on some black and white precision feast of silver grains witnessing the hardships of postwar life?

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

She crept down the fire escape again, wretched in the vicious cold of morning. Glanced around one more time, the backyard was dulled, the hues broken and the white lattice arch showing its bones through dead vines. But she remembered how it had looked in September. She slunk around the back of the house, narrowly missed hitting her head on a window a/c unit, hands shoved in her pockets. Returning to exile.

A tender envy held her in rigor mortis, lockjaw of happiness.
Wood smoke languished on her pashmina and she begged it to stay.
Her pocket were full of holy relics, plain wooden pencils from pinatas and a bottle cap from a Christmas Moerlein. She laid them out on the breakfast table, little artifacts brought back through the looking glass. The taste of the beer resurrected spectres of September in a rush. With Over the Rhine on her lips, she huddled next to the fire, admiring the splendor of the assembled company as they salsaed and mamboed on the wet, cold driveway. Here it was a joy to be a fly on the wall. Ursula longed for such a family, the sort of longing that compels one to eat whitewash and dirt, the sort of longing that fills you up to your eyeballs until you puke because you can't imbibe any more of it. She slept like a baby on the futon while the wind swelled up and roared around the old house.

La Morte de la Fay

Two girls ordered and sat next to a window spattered with the remains of an aging hurricane. One of them spoke of Mexico with reluctant longing. The other couldn't stomach the syrup in the bottom of her coffee and silently agonized over the unknowable predictions of her grinds. Together they lay out before them a map of their lives, while slowly, slowly chiseling away at a slice of key lime cake or peanut butter brownie. Outside lights began to struggle against the misty, damp gloom swept far up from the Gulf to the August graveyard of all such storms. Each girl was grateful for the weather, allowing for opened tall window sashes softly billowing curtains and sweaters usually reserved for Oktoberfest. Also the cool, wet pavement of the parking lots lent a brightness to the tentative shapes of their future.