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Fiction
Fiction
Bodhisattva
She saw clearly that God was physical, that God excluded nothing from His being, that there was no sensation or perception but that God was the sensation, perception, and the very consideration of these things.
June 1991Fiction
Bodies
I fell in love and then I went shopping for groceries. We were out of everything. There was milk and cold cereal. Bread. Boring.
June 1991Fiction
The Path of God
I write that name with hesitation, the pause that accompanies reverence. One does not scribble the name of the Creator casually. One does not toss about the title of the Segmented Deity without a shuddering respect.
June 1991Fiction
Beating Off In Mexico
It bothers me to age; I won’t deny that. I am bothered by what time does to my notions of invincibility. I am not bothered by the inability to remember — but by the inability to forget.
May 1991Fiction
Sonderkommando
“The Holocaust is boring, honey. I lost it with that last Louis Malle film. It’s as old as platform shoes. They trivialize it.” Carla isn’t Jewish. “You oppress yourself, honey.” I nodded.
May 1991Fiction
It Is Summer And I Paint My Toenails Magenta
It is summer. I sit on the balcony and paint my toenails magenta. Last year, I painted them cerise, Peter’s favorite color. The year before, my toes bloomed baby pink in honor of Angela, my daughter.
May 1991Fiction
The Hardest Of Hands
I see her push away the dinner plate slowly, with the same painstaking attention she uses to hide the letters from her father. She zealously guards his reputation; if I threaten it, she throws a rope around my neck and pulls.
May 1991Fiction
Gopher
The old man is sitting in his newest hole, a big one, half-concealed by the hedge. I squat beside it as he explores the dirt with his hands. Our lawn is a rough and violent landscape; everywhere there are angry holes, wounds that are unable to heal.
April 1991Fiction
Tanganyika
The night of the day that Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, my parents had gone to the art museum in Cleveland to see a stunning painting by Titian of Mars and Venus, a fat naked Venus and a Mars clad in Renaissance armor. But instead of eating a fancy dinner or making love in a motel room, they were frantically trying to book a flight back to Newark, New Jersey, which was burning to the ground.
April 1991Fiction
Sunrise, Montana
My God, he was a beautiful man. The way he sat on a horse. Or the way he rolled a cigarette. Charlie Freeman. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
March 1991
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