Shirley

For-Real Wolf Story Must a person keep casting about frantically for kindness? That’s all there’s to do? It won’t do to be mean, Johann said. Mustn’t be mean. He’s sick, I could probably say. He needs to go to the hospital. Maybe shouldn ’t say the rest. Jail hospital. I se e a piece on Facebook about narcissism—the malignant kind. The writer, Ron Kraybill, says it’s considered untreatable. Grandgirl Youngest brings a book. She’s already read it but she wants to hear it again. It seems the perfect thing for curling up in bed with, evil and all. Right away, page 2, Wolf falls down Pigses’ chimney. Next page, he gets taken away. The barricading on the back window of the police vehicle looks too narrowly spaced for him to have gotten his head out. But he’s stuck all right. “Oh my,” I say when we get to the part where Wolf has all the books, “I wish that were Trump. Shouldn’t he be in there? Yeah. He should be in prison.” A couple of pages later, Wolf has escaped. He’s ...

Monarch Sighting, No Kings Day I wanted to cry. Stretched ahead and behind along the street, the bobbing line of us. Those at the fore, crossing at the stoplight where police stood guard. Those at the rear, not caught up yet, strung across a bridge into the unseeable distance. The joy, because we were many. Past the entrance to the rally grounds, past the clotheslines holding blue butterflies, the crowd milling. Butterflies and butterflies, hundreds pinned on. Each a somebody snitched from here, snared, shunted to some hell. Soon the time for speeches, songs. Loud and loud. On a grass patch not teeming with bodies, a woman opening her wings, floating them up into the blue. Spreading, enveloping, spreading, enveloping. The child so wrapped and held would know only safety. Would for that bliss.    

This next piece isn’t about  wolfishness — not in and of itself. My husband has a habit of putting all his little things in little amounts in little bowls—his peanuts, roasted corn, pepitas, raisins, salty sunflower seeds, walnuts, pecans, almonds. This is when he wants to sit down with some. If he’s snacking on the run, he just grabs a handful. (Clearly, I have my own behaviors, but they’re not what I’m boring in on, here.) For a long time, his habitual plate for his habitual breakfasts was a plastic one from Grift and Sift, child size . The sides kept his toast and his nut dish and his cheesy scrambled egg from sliding off. The plate is in the junk now, because it developed a sizable crack, but one morning not so long ago, when it was still part of his routine, I heard him bawling at me from the kitchen. His coffee had gone everywhere. He must’ve misjudged, pouring it from the carafe.   “Do you want me to make you more coffee?” I called. He was taking himself and his f...

Speaking of butter—my butter here, not the golden trickling waterfall that pools in the hollows of a waffle in Agano, Niigata Prefecture, Japan in the story I just read —I’ve taken to jazzing up the browned slurry I habitually drizzle over green beans. I don’t just brown the butter. I enrich it, then, with nonfat dry milk solids I’ve spread on parchment in a pan and toasted in the oven. It’s a trick I saw online. The mixture—I keep it in a jar in the fridge—is what I puddle on the green beans after they’ve cooked. Having some, you might think you’ve died and gone to heaven. My mother used a particular glass dish, blue, transparent, to brown her butter, which confuses me now because my ovenproof glassware says no stovetop cooking. Also, cooking her green beans, like her mother before her she boiled them to a pulp, almost. And at the end the kettle had to go dry. No liquid. Just rich, unevaporated flavor. I continue the tradition, but over and over and over, I burn the beans. I’m n...

Asako Yuzuki, Butter, translated by Polly Barton, HarperCollins 2024 He had it coming through his earbuds, Zachary told me. He said Akiko was reading it. Obviously, I had to look into it. I got just a few sentences in, waiting on a chair in Target for my vaccines, before the pharmacy person called me over. Not the best start. Then it took me weeks to get through—my library copy, here, is fat-lady thick. They’ll soon be demanding it back. (If that upsets you— fat lady —I say check it out, yourself.) Sometimes, reading, I had to labor over who was speaking—I needed a he said, or she said. And the little I knew about Japanese culture only flummoxed me. The mochi, my word. In my mind these were the delicate, dough-coated treats Akiko gets at Trader Joe’s in Pittsburgh, ball shaped, filled with ice cream. In Butter, Rika’s mom has brought her some. They’re fresh. “Do you want to grill them?” asks Mom. Rika washed her hands then arranged the smooth, pre-cut mochi dusted with rice f...

What a Man Can’t Do This time we were on our way to town, not coming home, the wife captive in the passenger seat. Not yipping and howling at all, just being a regular man, my husband wanted to talk about his hen, the one from Stacie, our dentist. I’d been along when we got this hen, months ago. Even to walk into the chickens’ cage to catch her and the other bird Stacie didn’t want, her spare rooster, Stacie’d had to put on special clothing to keep from getting gored. The other rooster—Stacie’d intended to hold on to that one, don’t ask me why—had a terrible vicious streak. And then, of course, when my husband put his new acquisitions in with his longtime flock, the hen had gotten pecked and ostracized by the ladies. That’s just how chickens act. And now my husband was telling me about a weird thing he’d just seen. She still runs to the stone pile, said my husband. (These rocks in the pasture, a hefty distance from the coop, heaped like a burial mound, are from long before our...

Wolf Husband Ha. I was right and didn’t even know it. All those long-ago magazine ads I cut up, aiming to paste our grandchildren into the arms of the wolves—why, the one is really him. Here’s evidence: We were driving home from town the other day. All I wanted was to get into the house and drop my stuff, but heading up the lane, instead of turning into our driveway Paulson continued on. He wanted to show me something. He’d mowed down the stiltgrass the whole way up to the property line. (Sorry, but telling you about his despised multiflora roses and honeysuckle and all , I failed to mention the stiltgrass.) Now, I could understand him not wanting any aliens all the way up our length of the lane which we share with the neighbor. Evil weeds edging the gravel, either side they’re on, can waft their evil seeds across. But he’d mowed beyond our turnoff. We don’t drive past the turnoff. We turn in, toward the house, at which point our dog goes nuts. He hears us coming all right, but o...