Phil phoned to give me the lowdown on his latest divorce, this one from a lovely French woman named Suzette. Two wives had preceded her. I'd been best man in Phil's first wedding, usher in the second, and a mere bystander in the third. (I hadn't taken my demotion personally, supposing my friend too embarrassed to press me into service for the third time in fourteen years.) The sad news came with an invitation for a weekend visit to check out the co-op he'd recently purchased on the Upper East Side, an apartment in a pre-WWII building that New Yorkers covet—950 square feet of heaven that cost him a cool $2.1 million—a bargain, he assured me. Suzette had claimed their house in Scarsdale, and since Phil detested the suburbs, he'd hotfooted it back to the City.

I flew from Detroit to LaGuardia and cabbed to Phil's new digs. Sizing me up as a helpless Midwesterner, a gruff doorman of undermined Slavic descent ushered me to the elevator and punched the button for the fifth floor. Phil greeted me in the hallway. We man-hugged, shoulder to shoulder, finishing with a couple of quick punches on the back. I barely recognized him. My friend had a post-divorce routine. To grease his return to the dating scene, he would whiten his teeth, buy some new clothes, and drop twenty or thirty pounds. This time he'd gone overboard. His face was vegetarian thin, his neck the size of a starved waterfowl. A skinny black vest and tight gray slacks bespoke his malnourishment. He'd cut his hair short too. Later he told me a new girlfriend had dragged him to her hairdresser with an ultimatum: "It's me or the comb-over."   Continue…

Three weeks into retirement from the university, I find I want a clean kitchen floor. I want the wood to sparkle and the corners to be seen. No mop to my name, a PETA t-shirt is my tool of choice. Scrunched beside a pail of soapy water, eye-level with souvenirs of splats and spills, I dunk and wring and rub with fervor. The room sports a hefty scent of ammoniated Ivory when the last plank is wiped, and I twist around to rest against the wall. So this is what it should look like. This floor. This kitchen floor. Won't Jennifer be pleased?

Or will she notice? My daughter hasn't been herself—worried, I assume, about the new marketing position, which I will encourage her to take, regardless of the travel. The girl's lucky to have a job, times being what they are. And travel, as perilous and unpleasant as she describes, is still a good thing. You cannot live your life fearing terrorists or chatty seatmates. Truth be told, I always dreamed I'd travel more than I have. But time passes, you make decisions, and suddenly it's your daughter's plans that hold the promise.

The promotion is a good thing, and she must not worry about me. Divorced, I've lived alone for years, and just because I'm retired doesn't mean I'm retiring. Hopefully she can tell from the way I've spiffed up the place that I'll be fine. Cleaned out piles of New Yorkers, dusted my bookcases, and tidied my desk. If cleanliness is next to Godliness, Jennifer should be reassured. This might be as close as I ever get to the big guy.   Continue…

Between them is a door. Not too intimidating but still a door. Narrow: about 2¼ by 7 feet in size; all wood—solid red oak, or a good imitation. It is the thickest and strongest door in Lucille's apartment, resistant to warping. If one didn't know better, this could be the entry door, intended to act as a shield from external intrusion, immune to termite attacks—the type made to last for years by an independent artisan in a small workshop in the countryside. Using her imagination and more time to think, Lucille could smell the scent of the wood chips and the artisan sweat as the door was born. But right now Lucille cannot indulge in that sort of reverie, because she's having a conversation with her grandmother. She is sitting on one side of the door (the outside) and Celeste—the grandmother—on the other (the inside). To be clear: the door leads to the bathroom, and there is only one bathroom in Lucille's apartment. Tonight Celeste is locked in that bathroom and she remains invisible, although until now she's done most of the talking.

Lucille can think of very few instances in which people are having conversations across a closed door: a confession to a Catholic priest, a parley in a jail visiting ward, a withdrawal from an old-fashioned bank, a secret family reunion across the former Berlin Wall. In each of the above, there is always a device to break the closure: a grid or lattice, a fully tempered glass, a hole. But in their case, there is no such device—just a simple and honest closed door.  Continue…

We're in Chengdu. Except we're not in Chengdu. We're far from it. We're in Shaman. Except that's not how you spell it. That's not even how you pronounce it. That's how I pronounce it. We drove all the way from Shanghai, leaving behind 36 degrees Celsius misanthropic heat and a city plagued with roads. Until we got to where there were no roads. And then we made our own.

I'm with Coco, except her name isn't really Coco. Coco is the main character from her favorite book, Shanghai Nights, a book banned in China, so I don't know how she's read it. Her real name's Fang. I told her how much I loved her name, her real name (not Coco, which makes my eyes roll), and she thought I was saying 'I love you,' telling me, "It's too soon for you to say that." I clarified, but she said, "No, don't worry, you will say it soon." The aggressiveness of her flirtations made my lungs feel like they needed more air, her air. I told her that in America her real name would be very cool, very hip, very Goth, very dark. Everything about her is very. She said here her name is "very light, very feminine," that it means "fragrant."

When Fang goes home, she says it's all instinct, no reliance on maps. She told me to forget being rational, that American rationality had ruined me, has ruined America.

I asked if she'd ever been to America.

"No."   Continue…

Making the IED was no big deal. All you needed was a hardware store and the Internet. Any idiot could do it. Lonny Baum, who had lately realized that he was an idiot, built his first in seven hours. He detonated it in one of the woodier spots in Central Park. Despite the commanding Thrack! and the tree bowing down, nobody seemed to notice. The second one went faster, three hours start to finish.

The next morning, he strapped it around his waist. With his shirt on you didn't see anything, since at forty-two he was already pear-shaped; and his second wife didn't look at him anyway when he entered the bedroom.

"Melora." No answer. She went on painting her pinky toe. Melora was towheaded, full-figured with a lingering of baby fat, and looked like a teenager when she sulked. She wanted to get pregnant. Lonny's flesh was willing but his seed, according to the stork doctor, was weak. You're about to die, bitch, he thought—conceive that. All he said was: "Have you seen my keys?" She pointed her other foot at the TV stand, still without looking at him.

The prospect of being blown up didn't daunt him. And for her sulking alone, Melora deserved to be blown up with him. No, Lonny thought as he picked up his keys and left the room, the reason he didn't act was Perky, sitting at the foot of the bed with her paws crossed. She was fifteen, long past perkiness, but met his eyes squarely as he stood there with his hand on the detonator. How could he kill his wife for writing him off yet also kill the only female who accepted him as he was?   Continue…

Before the mid-eighties, before the big time hotels like the Omni Tower set up shop near the Marina on Shoreline Boulevard in downtown Corpus Christi, prostitutes walked the streets of Chaparral at sunset. Mostly, they paraded along the pavement and alleyways thinking up new ways to get picked up by regular or first-time johns more easily, more quietly, more quickly; then they'd busy themselves buying drugs off connections, showing too much pricked or pockmarked skin, avoiding their pimps' wrath, informing or running away from cops and keeping the more cautious, law-abiding citizens at bay.

B movies made real, according to Ninfa.

Just a few long strides southeast and they could hear the low rumble of the Gulf of Mexico; often, it brought with it strong winds and made the prostitutes look electric as it blew their hair into sandy tornados jutting horizontally out the backs of their heads. The sea breeze did this to me as I walked the boulevard and I imagined Ninfa (as Diana because that is who she called herself back then) and her girls patting their own hair down, running from doorway to doorway for shelter.

The walk from the Hoover Hotel on North Chaparral to the boulevard was an easy one when the sun no longer beat down on her. Diana preferred to bypass most of the other street girls and make her way to Shoreline where she'd walk the Marina and wait for the sky to fade from a slew of dying tangerine rays to near blackness; below the darkness, street lamps lit her way at nightfall. She'd sit on a bench and watch rich men dock their yachts, fishermen reel in lines, wary mothers speed up to grab children's sandy fingers if they got too close to her. The men looked at her from the corners of their eyes; the women stared in shame; everyone headed home because they knew too well what the boulevard became at night: a stomping ground for vinyl vampiras, mouths slathered red, legs dampened by more than the sea. An army of prostitutes in waiting.   Continue…

Hey, Kali, good to see ya, how's it goin', what's happenin'?
So, I'm inviting some of the myths & legends over for a pool party and I hope you can make it.

Who? Well, like Medusa—that GORGON! Her snakes are wicked and I love
how she's always SO pissed off! I want some of that AND her decorator.

You've seen her cavern, right? All those cool statues: people, animals;
where DOES she get them?? They all look so SCARED! Hilarious!   Continue…

Known in Poland as "King Kristian the Glorious"
the white haired pianist said,
after almost reaching the end of his program,
something not quite audible.

Was it "keep your hands off my country" or
"get your hands"? A murmur went through the audience
flummoxed by the indistinctness of his words.
Either phrase opened a roomful of possibilities.
Did I want new ones, or would I keep
those already attached to my wrists?   Continue…

             From Russell Edson, The Clam Theatre

             i.
"My therapist cured herself of a blood disease by running kitchen water
through her veins," I said to a friend who
sat cross-legged on top of the spotted linoleum table.
             I could tell she sensed the vacant chair next to me, when it erupted
into a spasm of Stuart Dybeck.
"Where is she now?" my friend wanted to know. "Living on a hospital in Montana.
             She goes to a ranch twice a week to stop the bleeding."

             ii.
The olive shoes had black soles, and though they lay next to one another,
their noses pointed in opposite directions.
"They look disjointed somehow," I thought, "like they could be
             sliding down hill and climbing back up at the same time."
The cylindrical eye of Mr. Sony Overhead Projector hovered on the ceiling,
flight commander to a formation of rectangular box lights
             each face gridded into four squares and two rectangles.   Continue…

Once again the moon is full.
September is ending.
Windows are open,
doors are open—
neighbor noise.
Wind died an hour ago.
Cruise ships may or may not
be entering and leaving the port

Friday night people
carry out high heel plans
bars concerts restaurants
dressy tank tops
instead of cotton
snug around breasts
and torsos
large and small.   Continue…

I waited behind the closed front door
for the postman to make his delivery and leave,
humming. Someone had sent me
a pair of burnt lips. I held them
up to my own, looking at our face in the mirror.
Bone clappers went off in my brain
as the first thoughts of trying them on surfaced.

I took it as a warning and ignored it, figuring
I could get them on with the aid of
iced tea spoons and gold leaf. I remembered
I had hidden the leaf inside one of seven
unwound clocks, but which was it? One of the two
sharing the painted yellow chair? Or
was it the one hanging from the cheek
of the palomino horse head on the wall?   Continue…