It's Friday, Not the End of the World, Okay?

There's a couple in the parking lot, making out beside a truck. He's wearing a blue polo shirt, khaki shorts, baseball hat turned backwards. She's wearing a sundress, has blonde hair. They are going to Shady Grove for lunch, I guess. I watch them walk off, wondering if he has an erection. I would like to think that he did, and that he was happy to be walking around with it, half-hoping people would notice.

The dog sleeps on two pillows, one on top of the other, in a way that makes her look incredibly pampered.

My palms sweat and itch like they did when I ended up in the hospital. What are they trying to tell me?

I tell the dog I love her very much. I tell her she is the sweetest thing, that she and Daddy are the best things in my life. When I take out the trash, I tell her I'll be right back, to assure her she's not being abandoned. Maybe she doesn't really care. When I check the mail I say the same thing. I like to think it means something to her, the way "walk" and "treat" does. When I say to her, "I want to pick you up like a little baby," she bolts. When she was little I used to pick her up like that and whisper, "My baby, my baby, my baby," rocking her back and forth. Now, there's white hairs on her muzzle; she doesn't want to be picked up anymore.

I wonder what that couple are having for lunch-- I recommend the fried shrimp. I wonder if they are holding hands, if he's still chubbing. I like to think that he is.

Imagined Twin

Read it here.

Inventions of Lust

Read it here.

Saturday Morning Blues By Fragonard

The scrim of rolling blinds gives a beige hue to everything outside, the flailing trees and clouds, which seem to have a Fragonard hue today. Could today be that lovely?

Just now I said to the dog, "That's not Daddy-- that's the lesbians." Because we heard a door slam in the hallway. Because Daddy is out hitting golf balls. Striking them. Beating them.

Right now, I'm working on a story about a lost dog, another about two old gay men, and one about a boy who has a crush on a neighbor who's wife has become debilitated.

Right now, I'm thinking there's nothing as lovely as darkly haired thighs.

And wondering if I should buy the new Lady Gaga, even if I think her new songs are too "message-y"?

And why "debilitated" sounds right but doesn't look right.

The Housewife is Always the Last to Know

I hesitate, but there's all this time, all this room, 927 square feet, to fill somehow. There are constants-- the floors, for instance, require constant upkeep, making of me a char woman of sorts, something like a woman on her knees. In a day, I develop pleuresy and die. There are other problems, too-- it doesn't end with death. It never ends with death.

Besides the floors, there's the bed to make, and furniture to dust, the tedium of housewivery. But it's what I hope makes me essential. What industry! What productivity! I want the man to think always, "I can't live without him!" Although I am the first to acknowledge the fallacy of such a statement. I've never considered myself indespensible. But who is, really? I can only make myself useful and needed, for a time. I do not take things for granted; I try not to, anyway. It's all a gift and I am blessed.

But I need to turn things around, turn the table-- well, not so much turn the table as to step up to it. I need to put myself at the table.

I told her today, wrote to her-- who do I have to speak to during the day but the help, the Marias who labor here-- that I was becoming sentimental in my dotage. I was being flippant, but I feel as though I have a sense of the edges of it, this. As always, I can imagine the worst scenarios, creating them fully, realistically, so that they bear, these imaginings, a vividness that makes me turn my head away, as though it were right there in front of me. But I wrote to her, "Wheel me out to the garden , if you would, so that I might see the garden one last time, its weeping willows and azaleas." The doomed heroine.

I think I'll try to imagine a better end, then. Best case scenarios. Life is rich, its rewards plentiful. I still have it.

Meet me on the Moon

Buy it here.

He in His Cups

Read it here.