Apr 03, 2020
Shlomo and Fanya
The girl, a matchmaker, asked to see Shlomo’s hand. Reaching from her coat pocket, she pressed a tarot card-sized photo into his palm.
The girl, a matchmaker, asked to see Shlomo’s hand. Reaching from her coat pocket, she pressed a tarot card-sized photo into his palm.
He always smelled like fabric softener exhaust from the laundromat down our block: like blue bottles of Downy and Saturday nights, when Mami would blow dry my hair straight with dollops of Dippity-Doo.
What does a melon dream about as it bathes in tendrils of rainwater, wishing to be invisible?
It was here that Dad told me the story. I didn’t know where the story had come from, or how long he’d carried it inside him.
She, too, often felt she would die if she went without physical contact. She worried sometimes that this meant she was becoming one of them.
April says the people at church don’t talk to us because they’re motherfuckers.
She updates the simple bio on her dating profile: “looking for nothing serious. I am really into knives. Really, really into knives, ask me about it.”
Maybe it wasn’t that Angie wanted to break things off with Kate; she just didn’t know enough to decide if she wanted to keep going.
This time of year, there are so many people pretending excitement when they feel none.
Who were we? Puerto Ricans stuck in a drift, still moving from an American haunting howling on The Island, howling in us.
The swastika on his sign is hand-drawn, a little uneven. Painted, not permanent marker. He made that thing himself. A Nazi crafter.
The prayer for air safety then begins to taxi to a halt: “Charge your angels, oh Lord, to escort the plane from take-off to landing.”
“You’re Mexican!” he said a little too enthusiastically, like I was just what he’d been looking for. I worried that he was going to put me in his museum or something.
I can’t stop seeing the brush in her hand as a scalpel, her countless bracelets jangling as she prepares to make the next cut.
My daughter was fearless about the near-earth object. “It’s just ice and sky dust,” she told me when I asked if she felt afraid.
Is years this place been here on this island and is years I see people age from this heaviness.
The cashiers and the butcher had eyed my wrist like it told them everything they needed to know about me. But the bracelet meant nothing to the raven. It was his toy, the part of me meant for him.
Of course Tinsley knew Mia’s book launch was on Thursday. No one could talk about anything else online all weekend, but she hadn’t dared to picture herself actually there.
He wanted to get as much work as possible, and maybe develop a mutually antagonistic relationship with a hero.
That was the problem with ghosts, they made the air around them poisonous . . . and the only way to be rid of them was to be rid of the source.
