Nearly parallel to the theater’s entrance, anything here would be a long shot but the ultimate payoff, just a jump to the ticket window. My car would sit amongst the other Haves, reflecting the dancing and dazzling lights for a splendid hour and 48 minutes. But without the spot, I’d keep driving, the theater shrinking in my side-view. The farther I drive, the longer the walk, my lateness becoming fully-formed. And from nothing, something. An opening. A break in the bumpers. I check for the obvious handicapped signs and the subtle shadow of a car farther up than the rest. My eyes are intent and my blood pumps faster; I swing the car out to make a wide right into the promised land, giddy with relief. Then, like taking a bar stool between the shoulder blades, I see it.
By David Holub.
“Look just sign them,” I said again and I knew that saying it again was not the thing to say, but I said it again, “sign them sign them sign them,” and then I walked outside, and I starting picking the dandelions on his patch of lawn. They had all gone to fluff. The dirt outside his stoop would turn to mud if it rained but I wished for thunderstorms. I wanted to scrub the grit from the air. It was that kind of day. Up above, the sky was the inside of an old fingernail. It’s all the same to him, I thought.
My husband’s best friend is named Dave. Dave lives in a van. My husband thinks that this is evidence of Dave’s exceptional intelligence. Dave has a common-sense sort of intelligence, the type of intelligence that people who are good at finance have. Dave determined that living in a van is cheaper than paying rent on an apartment. Living in a van doesn’t cost him anything, and since he showers at the Y, he doesn’t have to pay a water bill either.
There definitely wasn’t a hero. Twelve people in the kitchen tripping on acid watched Natalie run across the backyard at five in the morning. She was in cowboy boots and Tommy’s Grateful Dead T-shirt. We all watched her go into the woods and no one thought anything of it, no one went after her - not even Amber Montgomery, her best friend since second grade. We watched her through the plate glass window; it was just starting to get light, the sky shifting from black to a dull gray. There she was, Natalie Williams, running. That was last time she was seen alive, we ended up telling the cops.
The source of the hum is not important however, nor indeed, is the hum itself. For the hum is about to be eclipsed in audibility by the rumble. The rumble begins as a deep, distant roar, like an avalanche in some far-off mountain ravine, or the movement of large tectonic plates in the depths of the earth’s molten core. In the context of an office environment, such a sound might well appear rather disconcerting; ominous even. But the woman sitting at the desk is not alarmed. She continues typing numbers into her computer, engrossed in the finer details of her, rather unsexy, Excel programme.
I hear the door click. The car starts. I begin with my panties on. I usually think about my husband. We have fifteen years to think back on. Sometimes, I think about when we were dating, when we could barely wait until he was in the door before we began pulling off our clothes. Other times, I think about trying to do things quietly in the nook by the kitchen with our daughter napping on the floor in the living room while we stopped every few minutes to check on her. Mostly, I think about his voice, the way he smells, the way he calls me by only my last name - it seems more intimate than “honey” or “lover” or “baby”.
Eleanor said I could order anything I wanted from the bright refrigerated case. “Just one thing,” Mom interjected. “Any one thing,” Eleanor echoed. I scanned the neat rows of red-sugared cookies, the gingerbread boys and girls, the icy petits fours and custardy tarts. Bright yellow banana crème pie; snowy slices of coconut cake. Eleanor watched my eyes and smiled. My eyes arrived on the item. On one end of the case was a community of pink piglets, with blushing cheeks and curlicue tails. “The pig,” I say. “That one.” “That’s marzipan,” Mom said. “You won’t like that.” Like she even knew.
Elvis didn’t die. Everyone knows that. But I know where he went, after. Elvis left the United States. Elvis became a volunteer, and went to Israel, and worked on a kibbutz. The kibbutz was called Ramat Ha’shofet. Ramat Ha’shofet is not an attractive kibbutz. It has cattle, fields, a factory. Its communal dining-room is one of the largest in the country. Movies are screened there once a week, on a Friday. Chairs are reserved by placing a salt-shaker or a napkin-holder onto them. The food is bland.
The Needish male doesn’t spend half hour lonely, he doesn’t even go through the loving mourn of she, who landed a sandal right in the middle of his rear – the soft and life-size arse that had already prescribed the kick. He goes around and grasps the first one who walks in front of him, even if it is a plaster mannequin, as occurred to my friend Sizenando, the same one who worked as prime-cheated in the Rubem Braga’s chronicles. While the mannequin was led from one side to the other of the street, for an change of shop-windows, he threw himself at a blond plaster cast and fills it with sperm until these days.
She sat there by the window of the café wondering how she was going to tell him. The sky beyond was a flat grey-white, bright and sunless. It should be easy. It wasn’t like he didn’t already know. He must have noticed. He must have felt it. But the issue wasn’t so much about what it was than what it represented. It wasn’t a matter of her appearance but how she felt inside. She moved her cup a little and adjusted her posture, uncomfortable in the seat, still not used to it. She tried to remember how he had looked the previous night when they’d finished having sex and she had rolled off him. Had there been any uneasiness? Had he refused to meet her eye? No, she concluded, at least no more than usual. He had been drunk. She had made sure he was drunk. But all the same. How drunk could he have been?
