E. Michael Desilets - 2
Broadway & 116thmounted police
were waiting for him at the subway exit he wasn’t about to explain he was headed home from an old movie Spencer Tracy Me and My Gal Joan Bennett during demonstrations cops on horses discourage explanations and prefer you gallop wordlessly down the hill toward Riverside Drive and enjoy the jittery Jersey skyline On My Sixth BirthdayWhat I wanted was a carrot
but I could not find orange in my grandfather’s garden that snickering spring day. I could not escape the greenness. Even the tomatoes were colored by the stark spring green. My uncle, inhaling disdain deep into his doomed lungs, knew the carrots were hidden underground. He lingered on the back porch steps savoring his knowledge and his mocking smoke rings. He wasn’t much for sharing secrets or anything else. I did in time inherit his old comic books that he left piled beside his bed. I’ve always been slow to figure things but nowadays I know where carrots hide and where my uncle is buried. Sidetrack's Last HaircutMaybe he’d been a brakeman
like he said, rattling around the Old Colony and the Boston and Albany until he swam through booze all the way to the end of the Crazy Track after his betrothed drowned in Farm Pond. The sticky fistful of quarters was enough to cover his simple request: Cut it all off. Casella used the clippers and carpeted the hardwood with the longest hair he’d ever seen on a man. After Sidetrack loped away smelling of talc the barber doused every inch of leather and metal with Vitalis and wiped it all down with a crisp linen towel. Not much else happened that Tuesday. He switched on the Grundig Majestic. The Red Sox lost. Locust, Near 9thShe sat on the hood of his car again
hunched in the dark smoking her old brand. She had her reasons and a key she wouldn’t use. Four floors up also in the dark but smoke-free he gnawed on microwave pizza. It tasted like her tobacco tongue and made him cry. He refused to show himself at the window. That had been Cool Hand Luke’s mistake. She would be out of cigarettes and gone before the paper hit the stoop faithful at least to her punctilious boss. Learning FrenchAt lunchtime Laura’s left lens
fell out and shattered on Rue de Furstemberg. Her French was Hackensack bad but she pronounced “merde” with Edith Piaf perfection and at that moment fully grasped the concept of “le mot juste.” She gasped and spent the rest of the misleading afternoon half blind misreading emails, headlines, pursed lips, raised eyebrows, furtive glances. Well, c’est fucking dommage and all that Parisian whatever. She had exhaled the entire day by the time she confronted François in the boudoir. He removed her one-eyed glasses and proffered her a glass of Grand Cru Red Bordeaux and a glance she loosely translated as What’s the good word? I have a “mot” that is “juste” for you, my little baguette, she said naked to the gorgeous bowing and vowing blur he had become. It tickled her to let it trickle into his ear. Dream GirlThere were a few old copper coins
on the cardboard, a flat piece of waste from The Dessert Place. The girl's feet were bare and grimy, her gritty eyes the color of the river, the coins, the shawl draped forever over her grandmother's head. The crossing was deserted now, but the buses would be unloading soon a block away, and the ensuing jingle-jangle of coin on the carton would take her mind away from the cold. She stuck her thumb into her bucktoothed face and tried to burrow into the old woman's bony lap. ..........Today the river made no noise. Later, she thought, she would walk on the water as far as the Ha'penny Bridge. It would be dark then, the fog laced with ice, trash rattling in the alleys, after her grandmother slid back from the bake shop muttering as always about magpies. Time with Peggy
Mommy smokes Chesterfields
while she breastfeeds our baby brother Larry. Later I’ll make you and Stevie a grilled cheese she lets me know. Mom says it’s always easy to change Jerry because of the brace that links his ankles. Once she broke Tommy’s glasses with her boar bristle hairbrush. Ma trades stares with Kenny and Lenny. They are the last the ones who let her know we just can’t last forever. One Minute Dead
He was nonplussed to discover
that Heaven was his grandmother’s kitchen, not the Buñuel film he had anticipated. There was custard in the oven and no one seemed to notice the kettle whistling. There couldn’t possibly be enough beatific tea bags in the canister. But Heaven didn’t have to make sense. The linoleum was still cracked and there weren’t enough chairs. “Where’s God, Auntie Rie?” he asked his godmother. She was a girl again, the sublime babysitter who taught him how to tie his shoes and play Hangman. “In the parlor,” she said, her voice a silken whisper, “watching Lawrence Welk.”
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Boyd's Requiem, Cue the Incense
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