Fiction

The Measure of Snow

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The Two Glenn Goulds

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He had an idea to get the two Glenn Goulds, the one from 1955 and the one from 1981, to line up. He said to Tina, “Watch me work some wonders,” and then, at that very moment, the sun went behind a cloud. He couldn't seem to get the brilliant but near-dead Gould and the ecstatic young revolutionary Gould to merge. Still, he could have claimed credit for the cloud and the sun.

Picturebook

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In one of the photographs my daughter runs across the yard, the baker behind her carrying a three-tiered cake. The girl is wearing white spiked platform heels and a knee length pink dress with short puffed sleeves. You can see the big white gardenia in her blonde hair. Her shoulders are hunched and her head is down as if something has been forgotten. Her seriousness makes you look the harder at the preposterous shoes.

Black Wine

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“Black Wine.”

Was she perfume or fermented liquor?

“Are you certain you want me to call you that?”

Her car door slammed shut. She rolled down its window and said, “Yes. Now get your ass in here.”

A Family Story

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Jesus, if you could smell the fifty cats my great-great-great grandmother kept in that cluttered red room, stuffy with years, stinging with piss, you would have died, you would have choked, it would have crawled through your mouth down your throat into the pink of your lungs and filled them up with the reek of wet hair. Imagine what those felines did to the rugs and the curtains and the Victorian chairs. But she loved to hold them and bury herself in their scent. She loved the taste of fur.

Collision

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The hospital room was the size of a birdcage. Only a flimsy curtain separated me from the Russian man. His dumpy wife was visiting again, her sagging face done up in bold paint, and atop her head, a pink pillbox hat. Sure enough, the room was filling with ugly clouds of Russian.

The Enchanted Man

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Henna

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I will call her Ms. Shari, even though she was married. Still, Ms. Shari is how the head of the department and I spoke of her in a tense unhappy discussion behind closed doors.

Hungry

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An Unholy Mess

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Mike stood half-crouched, balancing a cup of hot coffee in one hand while lowering himself into the redwood porch chair.  Right then he heard her.  Rather, he heard the slider open and then the sound of her broom sweeping against the rough boards of the deck floor.  He sighed.  He had come out here specifically to get away from her.