Shirley

The first time it happened—late in the evening, in the living room—I yelled. The second time, too. I couldn’t just sit up from lying on the sofa (or was it the other way around?) without my brain suddenly spinning inside my skull, circling violently. But almost right away, it righted. The loopiness cleared. Then I figured out I didn’t have to yell. It didn’t hurt. It was just weird and awful. The next couple of days, I knew not to lie down or tilt my head too far. If I went dizzy erasing the whiteboard after class, from overreaching, I could drop into a chair until I steadied. If the room momentarily veered when I perambulated past my students at their desks, I could flail my arm around, try to stabilize. In case my brain was bleeding out from the head bang two weeks previous , we decided to take me to the ER. Now that was a trip. Because I said vertigo , when I checked in, because I said maybe a concussion , they told me to seat myself in the fast-track waiting area. Soon I go...

We think and we think. What would make any difference? Light fires on the runways, says my husband. The landing strips in Greenland, he means. Then the planes couldn’t land. No, I say, they could just bomb. Minneapolis, too. Somebody’s blurry footage got me going—that skinhead pastor up front, in a daze, and then his skinhead henchmen—bodyguards?—coming up and whispering. Never mind that we’ve got two skinhead sons, ourselves. (I’m speaking loosely, of course. Our boys are bald, and then they just buzz the rest off. Those church men I saw weren’t all skin, either. They all had hair on top. Their look merely lended to the ominous air.) People storming in, rowdily scattering the congregation—did that help any? What if those protesters had just gone down the aisle singing, like Jesus was just joining in the service? If they’d sung like these Christians here , We are marching we are marching we are marching o h ohhh we are marching in the light of God , their chirpy goodness spilling...

Framed-Art Tour, Exhibit 17     Now how, you wonder, did I get him ? That duck? I needed animals, you see, for this one wall in the house, and my sister’s duck just struck me as right. Orange feet, orange bill, the stuck-out barrel chest like all the other ducks’ in the world. I don’t think I asked my sister for the duck and she said no. This has happened—I’ll want this or that small masterpiece of hers and she’ll act all possessive, harden her heart. No, she’ll say, she wants it. But here, I just took the picture. This was some months ago. Amid the cats on her Instagram, the sheep, the women’s legs and other body parts, the seashores, the fields, the flowers, there before me stood the duck. I maybe already had the mat—I’m not sure. I taped my photo to the back, and that easy, I had me a piece of fine art. The one thing I did wrong, terribly wrong, was not think to slide the cursor on my screen out of view. Dumb dumb. Now it sits unchased off the duck’s chest feathers, ...

Framed-Art Tour, Exhibit 16 The Fall of Icarus, Peter Brueghel The Elder, Mus é e  de Bruxelles, Belgium. Gift & Thrift acquisition. It looks, almost, like he’s playing his violin, fiddling while Rome burns. Like he’s clutching the bow, sliding it across the strings, the neck of the instrument tucked neatly near his chin. He’s only turning the earth, drudging on behind his plow. Plough. Same as the fellow with his dog and sheep, same as the fisherman, he totally missed the splash. All we get, ourselves, is a hint: the legs in the water, there on the right. A boy flew too close to the sun. His wings melted, the wings his father made him out of feathers and wax. One can only imagine the father’s pain, Daedalus’s terrible regret. I’ve moved the picture here and there, from wall to wall. I’ve even hung a poem alongside. Mus é e des Beaux Arts W. H. Auden About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how ...

And Then at the End, the Very End Get it down now, before the memory bleaches out, before it stops playing and replaying—the horrific blow from out of nowhere, and staggering sideways and sideways against the force of it, trying and trying and trying with every fiber and bone not to yield to the floor, but impossibly, and thwacking the back of your head smack on the basement linoleum, with your legs afloat, your silly bare legs, in front of all the men done with their potluck dinner, men, reverent men, and you’re scrabbling blindly to pull your skirt back down. Then your husband is there, just his voice, Sit up, try to sit up, and somebody else, a woman, No, let her be, so you wait, and then you pull yourself upright enough to lean against a chair, holding your head, holding your head Y ou open your eyes to see the child on the sofa— still where she sat when you carried your slow cooker over, still with some beans in, and set it by the door to take home — and how she’s loo...

About the Note on My Fridge   Week and a half ago, almost my birthday, an Amazon package came. I tore open the bag, big, brown, smashy, no sender address, and pulled out two smashy cartons of Boom Chicka Pop, 12 packets total. My sister. Of course! We had a history. Gleefully I called her. “Did you see my message?” she asked. Message? No. I looked again. Down inside the bag was a note. Hahaha. We laughed and laughed.     Boom Chicka Pop used to arrive routinely, big cardboard boxes of it, each holding maybe eight cartons labeled like in a grocery store and containing a bunch of individual packets, microwaveable. My sis—she jokingly calls me Sisty Ugler—had bought us a subscription. She’d said she’d keep it coming for as long as I didn’t say anything mean to her. We swam in that popcorn. We sometimes gave some away. So easy to bump open the microwave, lay down a packet, wait rocking on our feet while it bloated up, and pour out the nubbles, exploded and salty, into...