an assembly.
The instructor sits at the head of the table. He is pale and yellow haired and his eyebrows become visible only when he cocks his head dramatically to the side. He wears a leather string that is wrapped twice around his wrist and talks about Characters and Challenges and Motivation and Language. He confuses Chekhov with Wilde, but it is no matter. He sallies forth, tugging emphatically on the strings of his pullover hoodie. His speech is peppered with sotto voce oh hells and shits and dammits. When he offers up the occasional and emphatically whispered fuck, his eyes linger on each participant, his jaw jutted slightly forward in a frozen, hard “ck”. Because there are thirteen seated around the table, this takes an exceedingly long time. Present and accounted for are two Londoners, one paunchy, the other unamused. Three women who wear turtlenecks; a playwright who wears stripes; an aged equestrienne in a chunky fisherman sweater ; a screenwriter/actress/boutique owner/recent divorcee in a shapeless but not unflattering garment that is shot through with gold threads.
“I binge and purge on chaos, ” declares the dreadlocked young man, whose coiffure, though rather untidy, has a decidedly festive air about it. The instructor nods emphatically, offering an extended eye linger to the speaker. “That’s deep. Fuck.”
cumulonimbus.
The lecture hall is cavernous. It is storming outside, and most people are still wearing heavy anoraks slick with rain. The woman at the lectern has on a thick black velvet headband, her voice is singsongy and high. I do not understand what she is talking about, but the anoraks are eagerly leaning forward in their chairs; drops of water congregate below their hoods and race down their sloped backs. Far above their heads, there is a hazy cloud suspended in midair. It is either confluence of evaporating rain and an escaped thought, or the illuminated particles of the PowerPoint being projected toward the stage.
incantations.
Susurrus: a new word to repeat in times of great duress. Once, twice, thrice, my jaw relaxes. Also, a potential name for a wizard from Persia.
My day is so busy and annoying. I have to go to the puzzle store and then to my shrink and then I have to print something.
—Dan
bake at 350.
In the middle of the demonstration kitchen there is a station with a mirror perched above it, angled so that you can watch as the instructor nervously taps her fingers: pointer, middle, index, pinky. We begin with introductions. First, the three women who have driven up from Cohasset. One by one, they provide their name and occupation. All are teachers. The plump one is retired, the tall one is a music teacher, the one in beige simply makes a vague comment about Working with Youth. Then there is Paul. He is short and round and his bald pate is glowing under the overhead light. I am from Korea! He shouts. He gesticulates wildly to the left, as if Seoul were located in the next room. I married a Texan! He continues. He tells us that they met at University! that her father owned a ranch! and that, over the course of two decades, he’d eaten many cows at said ranch. Too many cows, he repeats morosely. Furthermore! he tells us, he is a former Tae Kwon Do instructor. So, you know I ate a lot of fillet mignon. Everyone nods, murmurs, concurring with this logic. But now! I have high blood pressure! Hypertension! High cholesterol! We stand for a minute in companionable silence and then, we begin to cook. Paul is in my group, and we are making no sugar, no egg, no flavor gingerbread men. Paul picks up the cookie cutter, which is shaped like a snowman. What’s this? A tree? We tell him no, a snowman. He scoffs and shakes his head. A tree, he repeats. At the end of the class, we all gather again under the mirror to share our creations. The women have made cupcakes with tahini-avocado frosting. They are inedible. Paul, however, tucks in enthusiastically, piling them next to his tree cookies on a paper plate to bring home to his Dallas bride.
streptococci.
There is something genteel-sounding about colonizing bacteria.
He tried to cure his ear ache last night with an “old mexican remedy”: rolling a newspaper into a funnel, putting the narrow part in the ear, and lighting the other end on fire.
—Mom, on Dan.
edible arrangements.
Check out the holiday issue of The Runcible Spoon, where I explain how to craft a souvenir from the dark ages and how to distill C.W Lewis into a wintertime beverage.
she smelled like vitamins.
—E, on her babysitting charge.
Earhart.
We are next for takeoff. The plane at the front of the line bounds down the runway and leaps up. Its lights wink twice and then are eaten in a puff of cloud. I whisper my counter hexes and observe the brow of the man seated next to me. It is hairless, like a smooth skin shelf and I am tempted to touch it but I do not.
I herald the return of the earth; in my honor, the coast has been bathed in a tres Vermeer-ish light.
we are made of tin.
Possible occupations we could have held had we lived during the War of Northern Aggression: miners of coal, proprietors of a lively but dilapidated bordello, pages at the Appomattox court house.
a tale of two brothers.
The elder had moved to a small city in the south to trade in rare Magic cards; the younger had squandered his money on an ill-begotten investment in those small fish from Japan that eat the dead skin off your feet during a pedicure.
we begin in medias res.
Sleep had taken purchase on my lower back, its knees dug into a gully between two tendons. It shows me a parade. Everyone is made of stone, wearing togas that hang like sodden parabolas. The figures have extricated themselves from a frieze, and they march about stiffly, the feathers in their helmets standing tall, the arrows at their hips quivering indecisively. A dying gallic warrior brings up the caboose; he is wearing clogs and the marble of his ankle is white like a calla lilly.
department of traffic and parking.
The glass partition that separates us is streaked with fingerprints. They are concentrated primarily in the southeastern corner of the pane, like a tropical storm that will soon make its way towards a windblown shoreline in Florida. From behind this emerging weather system, the clerk registers my presence but does not beckon me forward from the holding pen. He is unhurried, his actions measured. He fingers one of the photocopied pamplets from the orderly stack at his left, pauses, then does it again. He stares at it intently, a diviner waiting for a sign from the ancient goddess Mimeograph. I notice that the tie he wears is checkered with a grid of boxes, precisely shaded to produce the illusion of complex three dimensionality. It is not unlike a Magic-Eye rendering of a curio cabinet. Housed inside each cubic compartment is a smaller pale green box. I imagine that if I were permitted to examine the material at a closer range, I might find a tiny rendering of Schroedinger’s cat inside. Instead, as I approach the counter, I find that three squares contain drops of this morning’s coffee. In another, an exuberant and subversive streak of blue highlighter.
