Krista has the personality of supermarket cereal—an aggressive love of color and cartoons, easily swayed by sweetness. I make myself indispensable to her, knowing her weakness for chocolate tree stumps and peach chews and Costco tanks of jellybeans. She came over like usual and I unwrapped each candy for her until plastic flossed my teeth. We kiss during the commercials that try to sell us fate in flavors we have yet to taste: new Polly Pockets, grape syrup to help you sleep and sleep, girls …
Things go missing in the nursing home. Helen’s weighted blanket. A letter from her late-husband. An abalone button. A cassette tape of crashing waves she bought at Acadia National Park after she stepped into the ocean for the first time, age fifty-two. A cassette player. A scratchy afghan knitted by she-forgets-who. A photo of herself as a child, mummy-wrapped in jackets and scarves, taken the winter when snow fell so hard it vanished the mailbox, the garden gate, the rhododendron …
and the mother sees it as her job to chisel her out. To Michelangelo her. The tools are sentences like, “You look washed out without makeup” and “you should suck your stomach in.” At the daughter’s age, the mother had to use her fingernails to hollow out space enough to pound her tiny fist against the rock encasing her. That’s how she got out of her block of marble. Her daughter would benefit from the array of chisels the mother had picked up: the point, the round, the flat, the claw. The mallet …
My lover from the future says I am dead in his time. My lover from the future also says the present me is of “lower energy density.” He shoots lasers in wind tunnels for a living: dissociates naturally occurring nitrogen, watches the atoms recombine in an artificial fluorescence, measures the movement under a high-speed camera. A contrived reunion of tiny things, I think. I …
We aren’t supposed to go near the pit on burning days, but it’s never hard to figure out. Last week, for example. David Finster wasn’t at the bi-monthly beautification meeting to petition, yet again, for replacing grass with decomposed granite in public spaces, Christina Hotchkiss didn’t show up at the neighborhood potluck after promising to bring the “world’s best salad,” and Melanie Birch started coming out of her house alone in the morning, no longer needing to carpool with her …
Everything is the same on the way to school, the beard guy with his cardboard sign, the white-orange cat that’s weeks-long dead getting pressed deeper and deeper into the pavement from our tires, and Bailey’s stupid big-wheeled truck with its tattered flag sticking up out of the bed, the I’m a patriot stickers of guns plastered on his bumper. But your empty desk …