"Son" I said squinting, I think we are here. "it's Colorado, wake up." I dug out the petrified french fry for Charlie, who was ripping up the upholstery in my v.w.
"Mom, why did we drop Frances on the highway, again?" Eric asked sleepily. He was plump and pink from sleep. I felt for him. There were many books under his rump, but looking in the rear view mirror, he seemed cozy with the dog. The sky was a deep navy, the long prairie grass synchronized so beautifully with the wind. And the black cows lying, trusting all this open...
"I want that and that and that" said the blond girl in the dark woman's pennycandy store. She wore an old dress and brought in a quarter, all in pennies. The woman, an Armenian, was her best friend Marie's mother. It didn't matter that she was. She was still frightening to many children, with her dark thick brows and the scowl. The long silver yellow hair and the odor of meat that is just beginning to sour.
"You have enough, get some more" said Sonya. "Marie is upstairs doing her homework. You shouldn't bother her", she said to the girl...
Chairman Mao came into town at the insistence of his family. He was not happy. His mother, whom he had loved far more for every difference from his father, did not look well. Chairman Mao, accustomed to finding his mother pleasant to look at, did not want to see her.
"YOU have abandoned your father!" cried his relatives.
"And my father abandoned me well before" said the man who remembered his father's cruelties all too well. Who were these people to remind him of the past. He loved his mother and he doted on her.
He despised his father. He...
The man wrote to the woman down by the river Yo. He had finished in the fields and his brother was calling from the high hill.
"Young!" he screamed "the soldiers are here!"
The man dropped his pen. The notepaper, pink and full of tiny perforations the man had made in the shape of a lotus flower, flew in the direction of a crane's nest. A young bird who was wading blinked at it. Soon, it began to rain.
The soldiers carried out the brother and left behind the others. A girl ran to the river for the pen as...
to My son before I die
Take me from this bed, your knuckled curtained hands the fear the dread, for I have none of that. Throw away the flowers, for I am not yet dead.
Take me out to lie again on the Earth
if there is any left
and let me paw the Earth like the Animal I am
here I lie, and She is warming to me.
Hush the forest. Hush where the bear was, the deer have been downed. Hush my screaming heart.
In the kitchen where I am carried after my father's death, I ask for one shortbread cookie filled with jam as my mother Connie smiles around like the carousel she is of feelings. I want to sit in the dark corner and think about the bear mauling him. My father Claus, lying on the needles and still.
I ran into the woods and Meryl knocked me out. Unintentionally, I was fighting him as I would a bear. He cried onto my suede, he...
In the event that you perchance upon a mythological entity, and said entity or, dare I say, entities, have desired coconuts, the directions for capturing said coconuts is as follows:
Step 1: Determine if entity — say, your brother — is malicious in intent, or simply a selfish flesh-eating neanderthal.
Step 2: Break his ankles, or perhaps if you feel lucky, both pinky toes.
Step 3: Steal said coconut, bash open with rock and/or machete.
This of course can only work in aforementioned mythical kingdoms. If your brother is Pelops, and you are Tantalus, then you are fully fucked. Perhaps...
"You know why girls suddenly change their hairstyles don't you?" He leered over my sister with that gap-toothed smug-motherfucker grin. "Girls change their hair every time they make a major change in life. Like pigtails right before or right after a break-up. Females actually believe this changes them as a person."
My sister giggled, which is my favorite part, right before she undid the top two buttons on her blouse, which is my least favorite part. "You're so right," she said. She kissed him, hard, right before she saw me peeking under the door.
She scowled at me, but she...
"His thoughts are too scattered, just give him a moment to collect." This advice within the high pitched laugh of a well-meaning mother. The tour guide had simply meant to ask her son a simple question, how could the guide know that the son had no intention of answering?
"Well." The guide sputtered, looking for a simpler way to ask the stubborn child with almond eyes if he liked the zoo. Finding nothing suitable, he reached into the cage behind him and pulled out a red snapper. "Here, hold it."
The child held his hands out and mewed with delight....
He knocked the three knocks. The two rap-raps. He whistled like a wren. Then he knocked twice again. The flight attendant replied, "Captain. Pick up the phone. I'm not playing your games."
"Oh come on. Just reply with the secret knock. It's easy."
"What is it you want?"
"To go to the restroom."
"Ok. Punch in your code and I'll punch in mine, and we'll get you to the lavatory and back."
She punches her code, her hand on the handle. She waits. "Captain?" She hears three knocks. Two rap-raps. A whistle like a wren.
"Captain. I'm a grown woman....