My Boy

He slammed the screen door, but the screen door demurred, bouncing against the door frame with a polite pat. He threw his backpack across the cracked-ice Formica tabletop, but the sweat-soaked canvas stopped it in its tracks. With two desires unmet, he couldn’t help but bellow: “I want ice cream!”

At this, his mother opened her eyes. Cat nap over, she kicked her outstretched legs off the chrome-framed chair. The thin fabric of her dress, no longer caught in the current of the box fan on the floor, deflated. “The fridge blew out. Everything’s melted.”

The boy fell to his knees in front of the box fan and screamed, his voice phasing against the spinning blades. “Ice cream!” He vocoded.

“Math homework!” His mother taunted.

“Waa!” He screamed into the fan, imagining himself a giant grasshopper who didn’t know the difference between a hot afternoon or a cozy oilination in a campfire skillet.

Then they heard the crooked melody as the ice cream truck rounded the corner at the end of the block. His mother grabbed her coin pursue and ran out the door, grinning over her shoulder at the ten-year-old boy hopping fast at her heels.

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Magritte's Lovers

After enduring
the humid chamber
of clasped teenage hands,

We vowed,
as adults,
intimate anonymity.

The only sweet saliva we would know was our own.

The perfection of our matrimony
mimicked the crown moulding.

A necessary unnecessary
that sought to define us as separate.

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César

In the reflection of his mirrored sunglasses she could see
the ironed smoothness of her hair—
a gleaming halo of gold—as the late afternoon sun crowned her:
Queen.

From the café table on the sidewalk, they could patrol the borders,
of the countries of murmured conversations inside the restaurant
of the brilliant green lick of the median dividing the street
of the as-yet-to-conquer City tucked in a thin envelope of fog, beyond.

She raised a glass of pink champagne to her lips,
smiling as the dishes and cutlery in the kitchen
fell forward in audible supplication.

He lowered his head to the clay dish of olives on the table,
counting the slick orbs as if they were coins
and parsing slivers of lemon peel before he thought to ask,
“Where next?”

She looked west, smiled again, and the sun fled under the horizon.

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Monster's Coffin

When I was half as high as the door between the kitchen and the garage, I caught a fever for the world between the real and the imaginary. Each side of the threshold was familiar: On one side, in the kitchen, everything was clean and tidy, matching and spotless, useful and practical. ’Twas the pride of an A+ homemaker. On the other side was the garage, poorly lit from one small eastern-facing window, everything shadow and suspect, grime and dirt, mysterious and unknown.

I hovered on the threshold, comforted by the orderly precision of my mother’s kitchen but attracted to the objects in the garage that could be whatever I told them to be. The woodpile, the deep freeze, the wicker laundry basket full of dirty rags. I imagined them otherwise: A forest of splinter people, a monster’s coffin, the collected cotton storm clouds of one gloomy Saturday. In the corner towered a custom cabinet of small drawers, each containing bits of hardware or some handy tool. After mentally pulling out the small drawers, each staggered just so, I clambered up the staircase to the princess’s bedroom.

I hovered on the threshold, bracing against indecision, two feet and two palms pressed against the doorjambs. Splitting worlds through superpowers, I wondered which way I would fall. At some point my mother would scold, “Quit standing there with the door open!” before nudging me out into the garage. She knew what was best for me.

My dad used more colorful language, “Shit or get off the pot!” He, too, would boot me into the garage, gently, with his unlaced Red Wing.

There I’d prowl, murmuring to myself like a madwoman, “I’m off the pot now! Off the pot! Off the pot!” Where to begin? Host a dance party on the monster’s coffin? Embark on an epic journey through the splinter forest? Or peer out the eastern window with my best forlorn face, curious if anyone on the other side might see me and think I was a ghost.

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Runt

She was born the runt of the litter and so thought herself a dog, much to the chagrin of her wolf mother. She thought, also, that love was better than snow, better than long treks through the woods, better than scavenging for dinner. And so she set off alone, hunting it. Love, love, love.

Each lover was a new collar, some comfortable, some too tight at first, some easy to slip out of if necessary. But she rarely slipped away, even in the early days when she could smell that it’d never work out. She was too proud. She’d found it: Love, love, love.

From the collar, the leash extended. At first, she enjoyed showing off all the tricks: Heel, sit, stay. But with every lover, the day would come when the leash seemed too short, the commands too predictable, her actions too taken for granted. The tug of war would begin, and though she was a runt, she was strong when she’d made up her mind.

One by one they all fell. The lovers she’d once welcomed, she couldn’t help but bite when they became the hand. The runt had to confess to and forgive herself: She was not a dog. She was a wolf. Collars be damned. She tipped her head back and howled her first howl.

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The Fox Upstairs

The man upstairs is a fox. The day I moved in, he stood at the corner of the parking lot, his dark eyes following boxes in and following empty-handed delivery men out. He stood there too long, and I thought maybe he’d lost his car, though there are fewer than twenty spots in the lot. I’d just finished counting–boxes, parking spots–when he stepped forward, extended his hand, folded at the waist, “Hello. I live upstairs.”

His shirts are always tucked in. His hair is always neatly combed. As he walks, his eyes dart left and right, scanning the territory. He is a fox, I tell the tiny jade bear totem on the bookshelf. “What do you think of that?” The bear gnaws his half-eaten fish, silently, in his own demonstration of always.

I hear the fox upstairs peeing, and it fits: The toilet is a cultured object, like the fox and his tucked-in shirts. There is joy in the precision aim of that peeing. I can hear it.

I also hear a hum. The fox owns a machine, I think, trying to Nancy Drew the situation with my ear pressed to the wall. What could it be? A minifridge full of Champagne? A computer mining bitcoin? A humidifier soothing his slender sleeping fox throat? What could it be?

I lie in bed at night following the hum through its arc and radiance. It grows around me, like a net I did not see. The fox has set a trap and I am caught.

I imagine approaching the fox on his terms, my shirt tucked in, clipboard in hand, and a polite inquiry to inspect all the outlets in his apartment. His eyes flicker to and fro and then he shrugs, sure. He goes into the bathroom to take another precision aim into the toilet. The half-eaten fish falls from my mouth.

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