Shirley

If these were the real thing, not prints, I’d be prouder. The actual inks, runny and wayward, and the actual sogged papers. Still, from Becca’s hands, they’re treasures. The cracked glass, well— Nobody threw their shoes at the wall. My husband and I handled the panes carelessly, that’s all. Maybe—just maybe—the jaggedness provides the requisite element of imperfection.        

  When light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it.    

  When light shines, or maybe glares.

People tell me they don’t have stinkbugs. Is this true? This can’t be true. Is the situation worse here? Is it because we live in the woods? They seem to travel in pairs. A little stinker will be lurking under a leaf of my Aloe vera, just its antlers and kneecaps visible. I’ll look around for the other, and, sure enough, it’s plastered against the window, deep in meditation. I’m reading, late, and out of nowhere one will dive-bomb through the lamplight, past my head. In the yawning, early sunlit hours one comes stepping across the covers toward my pillow. Like it has the right. Many lie dead around the house, except sometimes when I pick one up its legs wave weakly. My husband, who knows these things, says the bugs are non-native. In the objective, unbigoted sense of the word, they’re aliens, truly. And in my mind, wherever they came from, they’re spying. They’re collecting data. Beneath their hard little armored shells, they’re plotting. In the days ahead I will speak of...

Cookies for Barry, part 2   Because when I asked him whether people ever leave their rugs and never come back to reclaim them—he has a carpet-cleaning business—he stepped over to the pile of rolled-up ones along the wall, hefted up a big wool piece, unfurled it on the floor, and said, Here. You can have it. It once lay in Barry’s home. He’d been wanting to drop it off at Mercy House—a local, seedy secondhand shop for the down and out as well as regular ordinary propertied bargain hunters. Donations are always accepted. Barry didn’t know this, but the drab yellow was the exact perfect color. He said the rug we’d brought in—worn, too small for the bedroom—probably wasn’t worth the cleaning fee. He helped lug his beauty out to our car. When I took him his cookies yesterday, he said—well, I forget what he said. Maybe something about things working out for us both. He’d not had to bother with hauling the rug away. He has my everlasting devotion. But here’s what’s dicey. How can a per...

  Cookies for Barry.