It all began in St. Pius

Perendinate

2011-01-12T21:15:00.000-08:00

One day, for no decipherable reason, Julie decided to hold all calls, all interviews and appointments. She even gave her assistant the rest of the day off. She wanted to just sit calmly behind her desk, on her comfortable green chair with the worn fabric on the armrests and stare.

Two big deadlines were, for now, forgotten and put aside. The suffocating pressure of urgent deliverables slowly fizzled out of the window she opened. Her view of a small but green manicured yard was perfectly framed by a fig tree. She reached out and plucked one right off the branch, scattering leaves all around.

Sweet, purple and delicious, the fig disintegrated in her mouth. How long had it been since she had a fig? It had been years. This whole time they had been growing right outside her window within reach.

The sound of the phone ringing broke her contemplative stare and she slowly reached for the receiver and dropped it. She could almost hear the faint “Hello? Hello?” coming from the dangling artifact on the other side of her desk.

It crossed her mind that this could just be an excuse to perendinate and not complete the idiotic marketing campaign that was assigned to her. Her instincts told her otherwise. The moment she dismissed Elsie and set her Out of Office, she felt a surge of liberation and a tingle of excitement.

In five years, she had not missed a deadline, an email, a phone call or an appointment.

“Why now?” she pondered as she tried to get a piece of fig skin out from between her teeth with her fingernail.

This reminded her why she hated figs and how she had sworn she would never eat another one again. She sighed, closed the window and reached for her phone.

“Elsie, I changed my mind. Bring me a double espresso and some floss, pronto.” She hung up.

Those were the happiest four minutes of her life.

2010-11-11T18:25:00.000-08:00

Larry decided to move to Copenhagen because of a dream he had as a child. It involved grapes, snow and a salamander looking thing named Sue.

2010-11-11T18:10:00.000-08:00

My paper airplane crash landed on Ursula's head and burst into flames. The imaginary passengers did not survive and neither did her hair.

2010-06-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

She hides behind the constellations, whichever which way but west.

In the dark, when she listens to the crickets mumble their love songs, she thinks only of him, of his blue eyes, hiding behind closed eyelids. The way his arm rests on her chest as they sleep, cradled together in the moonlight. “Like puzzle pieces,” she would sometimes say.

How carefully she disguised her temper and how softly she would run her fingers down his back, caressing every inch of him with warmth and admiration.

“This man is mine for now, borrowed from the mystery of fate.”

2010-06-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

His dancing partner was pale and distant, like an apparition on the fourth of July, but the waltz continued to play and so did his fingers.

2010-06-15T01:05:00.000-07:00

In between posing nude for her internet fans and feeding her intrepid cat, Angie decided to enjoy the sunlight on her breasts one last time.

2010-05-28T11:43:00.001-07:00

What's good here? The lampshades with the garlic sauce, encrusted with electrical wiring with a side of switch. I'll have the tuna please.

2010-05-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

I feel like my heart has been torn out of my chest, stir-fried with some bell peppers and onions, then put back in upside down haphazardly.

2010-05-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

Old Jazmin Holtz told me stories in her garden about the time she found a disco ball in the attic and how she saw heaven for the first time.

2010-05-12T15:15:00.000-07:00

Lola's lipstick, gum and handkerchief, decorated with gusto and bravado by her lover's pen, were neatly packed in the box. Oh! and Lola too.

2010-05-12T14:54:00.000-07:00

There are two things you should consider when icing a hot potato," she said just before the whale swallowed her whole. We shall never know.

Cold Anabel

2008-10-28T22:30:00.000-07:00

In winter, she reminded me of my mother with those suffocating turtlenecks she loved so much. Maybe they reminded her of her life, making her inner pain and metaphorical strangulation physical. Or maybe she was just cold. Who can say?

In the park, she would hold my hand and laugh and then she would start skipping, swinging my arm back and forth because she knew it would make me angry. And when I would let go and continue walking, she would stop in place and sulk.

“You know I don’t like it when you do that,” I would say to get her back to move.

Staring at the ground she would mutter “you’re no fun,” and then she would slowly lift her gaze and look at me straight in the eye and very gently and softly whisper: “Beast.” When she said that I felt like crumbling, like turning inside out and transporting myself somewhere else, far away, maybe at home on the couch, watching football, with her at my side holding a bowl of dry fruity Cheerios on her lap. That’s where I would go in my mind, to those special moments when I was tolerable and she didn’t think I was an ugly, hairy, insensitive beast.

I haven’t seen her in ages. I can still remember the smell of her blond wispy hair resting on my shoulder and tickling my ears before I swapped it away, annoyed. Sometimes, in the shower, I start singing My Funny Valentine out of tune and with the wrong lyrics like she used to do. The things I imagined of doing to stop her racket every morning were many. I even bought a turtleneck recenty - the same kind she gave me for my birthday and the same one I exchanged the next day for 2 pairs of socks and a watch.

I don’t know if I’ll ever wear it. I am slightly claustrophobic.

Bowling Night

2008-10-27T13:19:00.001-07:00

Take me bowling, I said to him, trying to make him laugh. I want to sit in the pretty chairs and enjoy a cold one while I watch you score some fantastic gutter balls. I want to watch you lose to me. Again.

He laughed a sad, but hearty laugh as he drove his 50’s Ford Pickup with the bad seat belts. He put his beer between his legs and his arm around me. I could smell the cheap cologne on his neck and felt his prickly beard against my cheek. I laughed and pulled away.

He had just dropped off his daughter halfway between El Paso and Ft. Worth. The little girl hadn’t said a word the whole time. She held on to her raggedy doll as she stared outside, at the vacant desert all around us. She knew her time with Daddy was up.

He had been careful driving with her in the car to the gas station where her mother waited. On the way back, however, all safety precautions were forgotten. We sped back, passing cars at a 90 miles per hour, not turning on the headlights when the last of the sunlight dissipated in the horizon.

I was 14 the first time I saw him. He walked into my friend’s house and made his way towards me with the porch light shining brightly behind him. Like an apparition, he was glowing. And like an apparition he remained throughout my life - surprise visits and quick goodbyes, but never even so much as a kiss.

That night, as we made our way back to the city on the deserted highway, I looked over at him - his face pale but full of anger and despair. I wanted so much to touch him, his thick black hair, his lips, but I knew that if I even came close to him, there would be no turning back. Before I could make up my mind, he took the next exit and drove down a dirt road and stopped the truck before a locked gate. He pushed the door open and ran in front of the headlights and with his fists up in the air, he screamed into the pitch black night with so much pain and desperation. He yelled and cried and yelled some more. Then he stopped and looked up at the starry sky for a long time.

Back on the road, he was silent, as was I. He put on a Billy Joel song and said it reminded him of me and that he would play it every time he wanted to remember something beautiful. Again, he put his arm around me, and this time I didn’t pull away. We drove back the rest of the way just like that, knowing that we would never hold each other like that again.

He did take me bowling that night, and after 3 strikes in a row, beat me by 74 points. I watched myself lose to him. Again.

In El Paso

2008-10-23T17:19:00.001-07:00

I remember that night clearly, even though I wasn’t wearing my glasses and had been gutted and left for dead behind the Motel 8 on Stanton St. I remember staring at the underside of the garbage bin, liquid splashing joyfully onto the cement and thinking about how I was going to explain to the librarian why I hadn’t returned Crime and Punishment before the due date and if she could possibly waive the fees this time.

I didn’t want to look down at myself, at the pool of blood forming around me, so I inspected the crack on the bin with my fingers. Not so big, I thought. What could have caused it? Time, some corrosive liquid dumped illegally, or was it just poorly manufactured?

The remote sound of sirens brought my attention back to the Motel 8 on Stanton St. Carefully, I touched where my belly should be and found a foreign sensation of numbness. There was no pain. I explored what I imagined to be my stomach, and this, this thing might be my lower intestine. How curious. It felt cold, wet and soft, like seaweed, floating by me as I swam in the ocean last summer in Costa Rica.

The sirens get closer and a voice behind me says “it’s all right, lady. It’s all right. The ambulance is coming.” I just waved the voice away and I was once again floating in the pacific. I hear people yell and scream for me to get back to shore, but I ignore them all. Float, float away, under the sun.

A flashlight blinds me and pulls me back to El Paso, the alley, the smell. I realize the liquid flowing from the container is yellow. I notice the air is crisp and the stars are many as they pick me up and roll me away to be stitched up in some hospital. Was it Providence? I think it was.

up for air

2008-10-09T16:59:00.000-07:00

In the lake where I swam every day after school, I found treasures in between the pebbles and the plant life. Treasures I would keep under my bed, next to the old transistor radio my father gave me for Christmas. My mom didn’t approve of my random collection of trinkets and gold coins. Maybe she was jealous that I loved them more than I loved her; that I chose to be in my room all day organizing and cleaning the bounty instead of brushing her hair or talking about girlie things.

One year, when I went to summer camp she found the flimsy wooden box and gave it to the neighbor’s kid Pete. The poor kid had to be taken to the hospital after he swallowed every single sparkly item. The kid had a weird walk after that and the neighbor didn’t talk to my mother again. To punish me, she decided to sell the house and move to the city where the rats ate my food and the cockroaches took over my dresser.

Watching as the sun sets behind the high rises, I want so much to dive into the chilly water once again, and search through the algae for more coins, feel the water envelop me like my father did so long ago. At least, I imagine he did. I imagine he was a treasure hunter, an explorer who set out to discover other lands, leaving behind those hidden coins for me to find as proof of his existence, a promise of his return.

Summertime

2008-10-07T17:25:00.000-07:00

More like an intestinal problem, she said as she walked away and briskly crossed the street. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned my Uncle Gustav’s mustache collection or my monetary misgivings, but she didn’t have to flip me off and yell “porker!” for all to hear. No she didn’t have to do that at all. She should have considered my grandmother, in her summer dress, sitting next to me at the café. The old woman didn’t deserve such embarrassment or the ostentatious look of the waiter.

Oh well. It’s not like it was the first time that had ever happened. Lucia and Iris had done the exact same thing, but used a different expletive. Heidi slapped me and took my grandmother’s hat. I think my grandmother is strongly considering not having tea with me ever again.

I am sure she would say something to me if she could, but since the surgery, her only way to communicate is by blinking her one good eye. When I don’t want to hear her disapproving look or see her criticism, I just cover her face with a paper bag until she falls asleep. It works every time.

All I can do is just go on with my life. What should the next craigslist ad say? “Threesome”?

Ursula

2008-10-02T12:46:00.001-07:00

Ursula felt it coming long before the tornado failed to stop her soup from boiling over. From the basement she heard the guillotine at work and then the sighs, the awes and the pukes that came soon after. Loralee was probably the one who puked, she thought. She was the weakest, and probably the next to get it, or at least get nominated.

She didn’t like to attend such events so early in the morning. The exaltation would cause her to suffer tragic constipation, preventing her from operating the heavy machinery she needed to operate throughout the day in her farm. She preferred evening gatherings so she could be fully settled and have her tea, crackers and jam peacefully, with no digestive problems at all.

Long ago, due to a scheduling error, her husband and second child were completed at dawn. To this day she regrets not being able to see their heads roll down the hill and splash into the lake in perfect unison as she had hoped. In her basement she sat, imagining the rising sun in the distance and their shimmering golden hair framing the frozen, puzzled looks on their face. Were their eyes open or closed? She will never know. From then on, she made sure to schedule her family members in the evenings, so she would never miss the spectacle again.

Ursula knew her turn would come, but she had already lived a full life and she didn’t mind it. She was tired from working in the farm, teaching chickens to spell and goats to add only to slaughter them after they got their diploma. The whole process seemed silly, but she knew the townsfolk hadn’t nominated her yet because her work was important to the community. Nobody else had the patience to do what she did. Lord knows she tried to pass her knowledge down to her children to keep them safe, but they were too busy helping the poor and going to the university.

What a waste, she thought. What a waste.

Bemoan

2007-09-07T17:26:00.001-07:00

To bemoan is to be in a perpetual state of anxiety and to defeat the return of the hiccups. It also helps the insomniacs rinse the dishes while the rest of the world enjoys the brain as it archives the day’s activities. All this I know because I read it once by chance in the boy’s restroom while Tina lost her virginity 3 times and a half – I know, I counted and nothing could dissuade me otherwise – unless it involves ice-cream and gummy worms.

The knowledge one gains from the hieroglyphics rudimentarily splashed on to the smooth, shiny door of a bathroom stall is nothing but straight out fact – truth that has been tested, researched and proven.

FOR A GOOD TIME CALL LINDSEY – that, my friend, is as good and as true as the day is long and my belly button is pierced.

Now, the fortune cookie – that’s all BS. Don’t believe that stuff no matter how much you feel that indeed “you should look inside for riches.” I looked and all I found was goo. Goo is not riches.

(This story is from the "Legumes Volume 1" collection of short stories to be published in the near future)

The Kiss

2007-08-29T17:50:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I listen to the refrigerator motor in search of her voice. I try to find her words in the low, rhythmic sound of the ailing machinery preventing the food inside from decaying too quickly. I press my cheek against the smooth, white surface, the vibration traveling all over my body, and I imagine what it would have felt like to have her hand caress my face softly. She did so only once, on the day she left my sister and I on my grandmother’s porch, as the engine kept running on her El Camino.

From the 2 letters she ever wrote to us, in which she explained in great detail how to bake an apple pie, I found the reason behind her disappearance: a guy named Tom. There was no apology, no regret, just a simple statement tucked away between sifting the flour and sweetening the apple filling. I read the letters over and over again until I memorized them, until her handwritten words, commas and exclamation points had formed a sort of pattern that resembled my fading memory of her face.

All I knew of mother was written on the letters and the muffled whispers I sometimes heard behind closed doors. From these few clues, I managed to construct a rough outline of her life, but that was not enough.

Everyday after school, I would rush to the kitchen and squeeze into the space between the refrigerator and the wall, where I created and imagined thousands of scenarios, an alternate reality where a relationship between us existed. Invented memories of my mother became the missing puzzle pieces needed to complete the landscape of my mother’s life and to fill the void her absence caused in me.

Desert Run

2007-08-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

Lola told me to cool it or she would take me to the desert and beat me with all the Popsicle sticks she had collected in her sleep. I wasn’t paying attention to her, partly because she was French and partly because I was listening to a homeless man having a discussion with his penis as he urinated into a hole in the wall. I wanted to ask him to elaborate on his theory of evolution, but I couldn’t find the right moment to interrupt the flow of the conversation.

The smelly little man insisted to hinder my sensibilities with his banter about Hell and Resurrection – the two things I learned to avoid in my youth. I realized that the concept of coming back to life interested me a little more now that I was older, and when I turned to share my wonderful discovery with Lola, she was already yelling and spitting at the crowd of people who had assembled around her. As she was dragged away by the police, she shouted the alphabet in reverse, sprinkled with a few obscenities here and there, while skipping the letter P for some reason.

Hours later, her boyfriend Tommy bailed her out of the county jail, and she walked home alone in the rain. She called me the next day to apologize. She said the mushrooms she had eaten had apparently been laced with PCP and she was suddenly horrified of limes.

I think she had been starved briefly in a former life, but that’s just because Madame Turquoise told us so in one of her sessions. Madame also pinpointed the time of our deaths, and although we die at different times, I can’t help but think how much Lola will miss me in those 7 years we are apart.

Señor Contraband

2007-08-13T17:18:00.001-07:00

My momma was telling me the other day certain stories about the pet frog she had when she was a kid. The frog’s official name was Robbie, but she liked to call him Jimmy at night as he slept by his favorite purple rock. Although she squished him a little hard sometimes, he was, for the most part, happy to be hers.

She told me that Robbie had been called many names in his long amphibian life by the many children who captured him and made him a pet: Sally, Upton, Mr. Wrinkles and King Louis IV. His favorite name was Señor Contraband, given to him by a blondish little kid in Alabama.

From Ottawa to Jacksonville Robbie had roamed, hopping this way and that, interring himself in the earth during winter, waiting for the spring. His travels were only temporarily delayed by the curious children who longed to have a pet they could name and hold and sometimes dress up in little tiny dresses and hats.

The fun part was plotting an elaborate escape.

Once, a little girl, Isabella, trapped him with a very ingenious contraption using only branches, leaves and pickles, and placed him in quite an inescapable enclosure. This fascinated Robbie because, after all, he was a world renowned escape artist and he loved the challenge.

However, his new abode was a very comfortable and, one can say, luxurious place to live (nothing was left to chance – from the little bathroom decorated in gold-leaf, to the little TV tuned into the Turner Classic Movie Channel, to the astonishing view from his lush La-Z-Frog). One night, as Robbie laid awake on his waterbed with silky animal-print sheets, looking up at the little glow-in the dark stars and planets, and sipping on a very good martini, he realized he was getting a little too comfortable in his new residence.

Besides, he didn’t like Isabella too much. Mind you, he was thankful she chose him for her magnificent habitat, but she was just such a dull, uninspired child who constantly yelled out the Pythagorean Theorem for no reason whatsoever. Silly girl, that Isabella.

Peeling himself out of the comfortable bed, he walked over to his office and sat in his leather chair. The lamp was turned on and he began to draw his escape plan with his fancy little pencil he liked so much, on his personalized letterhead, printed on paper imported from France. He was going to miss this so much.

Once the plans were completed, he decided to wait until Spring to escape. There was no point in leaving his plush pad in the winter…even though it was only the beginning of Autumn. He could live with the constant mathematical regurgitations of the girl, who little by little paid less and less attention to him as she discovered the grandiose world of boys, kissing and calculus.

So, on March 21, Robbie hopped to the front door of his prison with his intricate plans in hand, looked back fondly at his private pond, warm water bed and silk pajamas and hopped out. The door had never even been locked (he had known that for some time) and Isabella, in bed with a football player while simultaneously solving a problem involving the algebraic computation of limits using the Squeeze Principle, didn’t even notice his departure.

Off he went, into the world once again, to be captured and released by many children like my momma had so long ago.