I have a good terrier with a weak heart. She’ll die early. She’s still young, just four, and her condition isn’t apparent unless she’s playing hard at fetch or chase the hose water. When it gets her, she stops, lies down, rolls over, breathes, and waits. It’s syncope — the light headedness you feel when you stand too fast. Her heart can’t keep pace with her legs and her lungs and eventually there isn’t enough blood to her brain. When she was a pup it would sneak up on her while she romped — Boom, and over she went. She’s [Read More]
new short fiction
Making a Buck
Today at the checkout in Whole Foods, the checkout girl, or young woman, I guess, scanned my fancy ginger ale and said, “Making a Ginger Ale Mojito?” “Err, no. Not a … Mojito. I will be making a Buck.” “A … Buck?” “Yes. It is an old cocktail, well not truly a cocktail since there are no bitters, but nobody really pays attention to that. It’s a descendant of the Sling, which is an even older mixture, a portable Punch. Grog fits in there, too. A Buck is ginger ale, rye, and the juice of half a lime, over ice, in [Read More]
See the Orange Write the Orange
It’s poetry month at the writing academy and I want the students to practice describing things accurately. From a suggestion in Robert Wallace’s Writing Poems, I’ve decided to use the first springtime oranges as objects to describe. We read a few haikus, first, to get an idea about how an accurate description of a thing can say something about the poet (or more). I like to keep things simple at the writing academy. I cut an orange in half, then I cut one of the halves into four pieces and arrange everything onto a translucent plastic plate. The plate is yellowish, the [Read More]
The Monkey Trials
Harrison doesn’t understand what he’s seeing at first. He’s trying to drive his car into the garage, but it’s blocked by some kind of mess strewn across the floor, so he parks in the alley and walks inside, flipping on the extra light as he comes in. It turns out that it’s not a mess, and, in fact, it’s pretty well organized. Stanley has arranged most of his stuffed animals in a semicircle facing the back wall, and there seems to be a logic to the seating as well. The monkeys sit up front, ten of them in all, followed [Read More]
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