Gloom Cupboard

I. Seeking             She was the quiet one, the weeping willow who soft-stepped into a room, causing all heads to turn.  I stood beside her, soothed by her geisha-like stance.  I loved her, ignoring her follies, and pretending that she understood my tales.  I believed we both heard the same song, and that song would [...]

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- I’d like to rip myself apart to prove to you how I work. Standing on the edge of a mental precipice, and the choices seemed to overwhelm me, each colour invading my sequence, I started to externalize every thought, the actions of others no longer had any meaning to me, indeed the forms and [...]

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You look depressed. I want to sweep my hand across the table when people say things like this. My spine straightens as I imagine the sound the glasses will make when they smash, how everyone will jump. I can’t sleep. He smiles like we’re old friends. We’re not. He’s old friends with the one sitting [...]

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When people ask me if I miss it, I tell them about mangos. I’d never had a mango until I moved to New York. The first one was long and tough, like a pear with thicker skin, and it smelled like places I’d never been. I ate the meaty part and then ran my teeth [...]

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It’s my first lesson of the morning, but I’m already in a rough mood. Teaching seven or eight lessons day after day is like driving to Seattle and back on a daily basis. Given my random crop of students, it’s like spending each day with a series of cabbies whose skills you don’t quite trust. [...]

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My mother eloquently captured the incongruous nature of her marriage to my father with a powerfully mundane anecdote: her own mother, dirt-poor Irish immigrant though she was, offered her every penny of her paltry life savings to not marry my dad. For my maternal grandmother, an ever-suffering Catholic from the land of perpetual potato blight [...]

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a terrible decision has been made, the outline of discovery made, intricacies, delaying the downfall, dream state and reality merging into one, dreams of murder by strangling, a view of violence and guilt, but still, a delay in proceedings causing anxiety in long distance trawler fishermen, although they certainly will deny this.a terrible decision has [...]

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            “Let’s tell each other everything we’ve never told each other.”             “You first.”             He’d called her on the phone, long distance, from a tiny island off the coast of a far-off continent.             He said, “I think I hit something or someone with your car.”      

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Three weeks after he died, Blake casually walked past me, opened the door of a blue hatchback and drove away.  It was far from the beat up clunker he drove when we started college, and I wondered how he was able to afford it.  None the less, I quickly slid my car into drive and [...]

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            I’ve done this once before when I needed extra cash; sold my dead mother’s jewelry.   I harbor no sentimental attachment to any of it or to any that was given to me when I was a child.   Horses are what I value— endearing chestnuts, somber browns, and a couple of scrappy gray ponies. They [...]

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