Some suns don't burn long. At least not ones I've known. They are too bright against an already bright blooming sky and people rage to put them out because their eyes hurt. Eyes should be peaceful, inside and outside and behind. Peaceful like the top of a cloud that only God sees. Golden white, like a fallen steeple in the sand.  "What are you afraid of?"  "Alchemy," I said. "It turns something real into something useless."  My cousin Brad is very good at building ladders. Excellent, I would say. I saw him sometimes, chopping wood.  I thought about swiping one of Brad's ladders when I was a child. I used to creep out on the screened-in porch and watch him, shielding my face from him with a fleece, blinking-- He heard me blink. "Come here, Jesse."  I swallowed.  "Help me chop some wood," he said. But I was afraid of my cousin because, among other reasons, Brad was bald, and the bur...

Sun swarms, you know, in trumpet bells. It’s mad like snow storms in springtime. ‘Jazz night?’       So Stella sang memories and allowed them to bump into each other. She remembered what she learned in theory: “It is about control and manipulation. It is not about kissing the sky.” Sure, she believed it. Believed it in her belly and in the whites of her eyes. Saw it in the light in the bell of a trumpet. Sun swarms more inside than outside. Sun doesn’t kiss the sky, sun is the sky, looming like an unexpected airplane in your peripheral, spontaneous like children who leap up during concerts and run up and down banisters, who scribble in notebooks during church, who build miniature snow men in spring-snow-time recess. It’s more than a ritual.                                                                   ...

Joseph cut off a quarter of his thumb peeling potatoes. But it’s a good idea to finish what you start. While Joseph’s thumb healed he rode the elevator: there were no hand rails, no mirrored ceilings.             “Sir,” he greeted Kirby, when Kirby stuck his hand between the elevator doors.             “How are you?”             “Pained.”             Joseph nodded. “I cut off a quarter of my thumb today, peeling potatoes.”             Kirby frowned and nodded. Nodding is polite, you know. Even if you don’t understand, you’re pretending to understand.             The elevator shook a little because of the wind.       ...

Geoffrey unwrapped the gift when nobody was looking: a mango, and it sat on the counter observing the flutter of wrapping paper, the general unease of decadence, the laziness of light fixtures.              “That’s ok,” the others said. Geoffrey could have the mango if he wanted. He thought long and hard about drawing a face on it. Some siblings said no.             “You’ll mess it up.” said Suze, but Geoffrey wanted to draw the face. Geoffrey was obviously artistic because he wore Weston’s hat sometimes and wore the same shirt three days in a row and left the bus stop last Tuesday to go hunt lizards.             Then Geoffrey decided that mangos do not have faces and that’s just fine—he put the mango in Suze’s American Girl Doll cradle and it lay there for a long while slurping shallow breaths sometimes. On the very-merry-day...

I never run for long. Just long enough for a pleasant loop around all the pretty houses, around all the ugly houses. When I run, I teach my mind to wander.             Just yesterday some folks and I went out for clam chowder. I’m an old fool and a lazy conversationalist. Making good conversation is like avoiding sprinklers in your mother’s garden. I had to do something in that damn fish house, so I scribbled a few words on a napkin: romance: an empty tin of chocolate covered raisins.             Anyway.             I’m running under silver rain on a weepy street that sweats worms. The moon hums. I listen to restless, slithering serpents in the grass. Funny what might be considered a song. A voice shatters everything. “Dad?” Oh no, that’s my son. My son and his burgundy van.      ...

Tonight I would like to hold dusk in my cupped hands, but broken leaves on indoor trees are far too close to the fire. I’ll just watch them drip.             “I’m bored,” Oscar says. Oscar is my grown son. Grown sons shouldn’t be bored. He’s a brat. “We’ve got to shut the windows, it’s too hot out,” he says. Practical Oscar says what he’s thinking even if he knows I won’t like it.             M. Air Conditioning tries so very hard to stifle his footsteps, but I can still hear him. He may as well be an intruder, poking around in my spice rack and licking up the remains of the nutmeg. Oscar and I eventually settle down in Chamois chairs. We munch on yellow popcorn out of red and white striped metallic containers.             But it is hot out, and hot out means drinking blueberry cider in a copper flask. Hot out means...

When Pho wears red velvet heels as slippers she thinks of all the people — all the imagined people — and she watches their concerned faces through a keyhole on Sunday afternoon as they dance and dance in Lennon’s deserted ballroom. And all the people agree that Pho is most certainly mad.             Because on Tuesday nights and Thursday nights and Sunday nights too, dark melodies waft out of the musty, mildew house on Mulberry Street (Dr. Seuss cannot keep all the street names to himself) where Pho perches in her window, with a bush of strawberry hair casually crouching on her head. She is full of distinct yearning to create a pair of wings. Not because of a lack of functional wings, or because the wing factory is broken, or because birds are dropping from the sky in spirals, but because darling Pho would very much like to create a beautiful thing of her own. Someday, this beautiful thing shall be fixed to the wall of a fancy mu...