No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
We finished work at five. No time for dinner. The weather was bleak and getting bleaker, windshield wipers swatting sleet and sleet still coming, brake lights strung like beads along a northbound red zone—Google Maps rerouting. Thirty minutes turning into forty, forty into forty-five, but this could be our lucky break. We were determined to arrive.
. Look, she said, pointing at the painting of arms like vectors to an otherwise armless place. We hunched before canvas after canvas laying our sketchbooks on the floor, lead scattering ant-like under our scabbed elbows. This is what it takes to be made right: to follow the leash of each other’s bare hiccups, our impressions of the world yet unformed.
Frustrated, I swiped up on my phone and went back to Instagram. I had to triple-check if it was her account because all I could see was that she had no posts. But it didn’t make any sense, there was just the one with her cat, the earlier one with her baking cookies, the one where she was at the gym with her cousin, the one where she and the same cousin were hanging outside her house, and the one where she and the same cousin were at a garden, with him helping her feed the koi fish. It was all gone.
She blocked me.
He loved blaming the “Damn Protestants” for any misfortune, like when the rotary tiller broke down. Mom says his dislike for them was really about their ban on playing cards.
You hear the earth calling from under you and the chewing sound as it turns.