"Emulsion"
An excerpt.
"The House Beyond Lapham"
An excerpt.
“I was standing there in my socks pouring a glass of water at two-something in the morning. I didn’t want the hideous mouse brown carpet to get bloody because not that it would show, but the carpet isn’t mine. And out of principle because I’ve been taught stewardship. It’s just flopping about and slinging water. You could taste the salt. I was unsure how to contain the situation. I must have passed out around one. I found the unfamiliar remote and fumbled for the power button to turn off the Wolfgang Peterson flick on AMC with its sweaty foreheads and authentic grit (not true, as it were because the film runs a score of sonar pulses which beep, beep…beep). Scales are tough as hell. They stand up against the universal solvent. They also are two dimensional, easy to hide at the right angle. Then they get right in your skin. They covered me and littered the walls and the flooring. The parqueted wood at my own house was taken out and the concrete was releveled for three months and lain on top is now a raw umber (it is not, but ‘Jacobean’ is a fucked name, really, doesn’t sound slippery and coarse, and the simultaneity is important, the way the damp earth and foliage feel when you carve your sore hands through) and its sheen is calming, particularly when natural light wallops across it. Walloping and flopping now was this goddam hotel intruder in the glass. It cried out wildly raspy shrills. Unusual, for a fish,I thought. Outside, the clear night-sky made what was happening almost comical, the taunting peacefulness backdropping the goddam clusterfuck of a circus. The retroussé starlight tapestry just collectively forming the snootiest wrinkles and slants and arcs, turning the other cheek to the chaos trapped inside my room. But my view was blurring anyway.
I first met them all while I was still seventeen and a senior at Rutland High School. Over the announcements one morning, Principal Jergens read a ‘wanted’ ad from a few local families who’d reached out to the high school in search of tutors. Well, I didn’t give much thought to the announcement, because no one hardly listened to the announcements anyhow. But Jergens repeated the offer every day for about two weeks, and within that timeframe I walked out of Al’s Fries & Shakes shop for the last time, shoving my apron into the small dumpster across the parking lot, and spitting on it before slamming the lid. The next day in my first period class, before the bell rang, I wrote “INCOME” at the top of my notebook. Then, Jergens read that ad over the intercom, and this was a Monday or a Tuesday, and by the weekend I had an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Wagner.
To get to the house you drive north up Woolridge about fifteen minutes until you hit Lapham, where you’d see the old white barn in the field to the west, cherry trees beyond that, and you turn right on Lapham, heading east, across the railroad—which god forbid would begin its uproar of red lights and then drop its Do Not Cross boom barrier and you’d have to sit in your car for twenty minutes while the train whined and clicked and rattled past—and past the Deer Crossing sign and finally, on the left, you’d see a dirt path where the trees had been narrowly cleared, and this private road went on for a quarter mile. There was a mailbox post with a single mailbox, natural oak, which had been painted in black paint to read “Wagner.”
Mr. Wagner smoked Luckies and wore a tan Carhart even through the summer months. A taller fellow, he had a bulbous nose and mostly kept a quiet face beneath his beard. He sure had a barrel of a laugh. His wife, Mrs. Wagner, was sensible and warm. Anytime you’d show up she’d offer you a cup of coffee or a granola bar—really anything you wanted, she’d offer. The Wagners weren’t well-off, as some might refer to others, but they certainly had their needs met.
"All Ephemeral"
An excerpt.
Libby wore blue jeans and a plain button back top with scrunched dirt stains, no shoes. Bracing herself with one hand in the pine straw, she carved her violet spaded shovel downward—meticulously to a shallow depth. The unaroused flowers stood together in the late April soil like a stagnant crowd. Thousands of rootlets crawled and wound and twisted through the ground.
Libby leaned on her small shovel of justice, quietly guillotining the foliage, playing God in her garden. She pulled back her shovel in which rested a weed, simple and sparsely decorated. She examined the corrosive little beast, its skin, its viscera. She slopped the dying plant into the five-gallon bucket beside her.
The small garden was enclosed by a wooden fence painted white that rose twelve inches above the ground; the interior was lined with mesh, and the two barriers were intended to impede entry of neighborhood varmint. To keep critters off Libby’s daisies. Through feverish toil Libby had managed to flood her garden’s flowers outside their walls and along the yard’s chain-link. And Libby had speckled her daisies, tens and hundreds of daisies, up and down the yard’s perimeter.