Rope, clip, harness, 70 feet above the ground. In the moment after the jump my body relaxes, opens, and one arm flings back in flight. Finally. The Earth is to my back, the sky is a huge blue audience. Then the moon gravity of the cliff pulls me in. When my feet contact the rock, everything spins [...]
Ka-thump.
Ka-thump.
Ka-thump-thump.
… !
Bang.
Ka-thump.
Ka-thump.
It’s an instant of, not fear exactly, but something that dissipates like a wave through your body. Your heart is still beating. It was just an ectopic beat, probably a PVC. Happens all the time, even in perfectly healthy hearts. Relax.
This is walking down the street, mind you, so you [...]
We were halfway down the beach when K. started coming up. Past Dreamcatcher, before that next big one with the unfortunate name – what was it? Cock’s Town? Sometimes the Indians miss the mark, and you have to admit, it’s pretty funny. It was New Year’s Eve in Goa, and we could do anything.
Now they were standing face to face on the steps, a meter apart. He wondered if was unusual or suspicious for a woman alone to talk to a strange man in public. The capital cities were usually more liberal, but there was no way to know for sure.
Once there was a family of acrobats. There was a father, a mother, their son and two daughters. The entire family worked for a circus, performing on a high-wire. Night after night they leapt and balanced far above the ground. They loved their art, and they were very happy.
Then something terrible happened. One night at [...]
But sometimes she’s on stage with torn fishnets. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are playing and she’s dancing in the living room at 9:00PM on a Saturday night, waiting for her posse to arrive. They’re drunk already and loud, probably British, stepping into her apartment supporting one another and screaming over the tops of their cleavage. That’s the night out to come, a rage, a raw euphoria blind and sloppy. It’s screaming sex when you just don’t care anymore what the neighbors hear. If there’s a cost for this much life, so be it, but dear god she’ll think about it tomorrow; and the fishnets will never be mended because that’s the girl she is.
It was not long into our first year together that I found the book.
It was a handsome hardcover volume, the sort of heavy, expensive book of photographs that the too-stylish always seem to have on their coffee tables. When I first came across it, it was sitting on the small desk next to the big window in her study. The title was simply “Michelle,†written in elegant gold script subtly embossed into the dustcover. The black and white cover image depicted a woman sitting at an outdoor café, in the process of bringing a big latte to her lips, smiling. I looked hard at that photograph for a second, and saw that the woman with the coffee was indeed my Michelle, in her famous white dress.
There is girl who lives inside a song, a song from a summer that never happened. It’s a slow, wordless melody of long warm afternoons. It’s yellow and green, sunlight filtering through tall grass, flecks of seeds floating in the air. Most of all, it’s a girl with sandy hair.
She’s seventeen, a few months younger [...]
now,
one fine night going out on the town
the music’s jumping and the girls are down
Blue eyes, brown eyes, blondes and brunettes
leaving’ me wanting,
lookin’ like sex
Yeah I’ll stop to stare as you put on your show
but tell me something I don’t know
see the problem I find with the ladies today
sure they got the style but the [...]
I used to have a tail. I remember it from when I was a child. It was long and soft like a cat’s tail, but prehensile like a monkey’s. I loved my tail very much. I would climb things with it, using my hands and my feet and my tail to scale trees, fences, furniture, [...]
