I should have locked it up when I had it | hauled itin my Holly Hobbie lunch box | kept itin the carport, cubbyhole, brass flask, bunker | slammed itin my locker and tossed the combination | I should havegifted it vespers, backhanded compliment [...]
Long ago, in the ancient year of 1975, two ambitious young scientists sought to apply the awesome power of SCIENCE to the study of LOVE. But a strange little senator from Wisconsin vowed to MAKE THEM PAY! Jim Coan presents: The Golden Fleece Award!
In July 2021, five weeks after my mother died, my husband dropped me off at the emergency room of the small hospital in the Massachusetts town where my father now lived alone.
He was doing the dishes, midmorning, when he noticed the white car drive by, and drive by again. A quiet street, on the way to nowhere. At eleven, the school bus would show up, to deliver lunches to the children who couldn’t go to school. Otherwise, almost no cars he didn’t recognize.
Forgive me, I have smuggled them away from my father’s house to this sodden pitch in the middle of my life, their names asleep under my tongue. I have walked
Rochelle and her mother lived in a large town that was on its way to becoming a small city. On her way to school, Rochelle often stopped to watch the crews of construction workers erect a new house in the hole where, only a few days before, one of her neighbors’ houses had loomed in sour glory, a car parked on its front lawn, silk flowers sprouting along its foundation like hair plugs.
I’ve been working for the Chicago Tribune for about a year when it strikes me that I will go home in six months. The ticket has been booked, and I’m ready. My boss has reviewed the JavaScript code and made his updates for the day. The code is in production.
By Gregory McNamee, Illustrations by Lauren Simkin Berke
December 3, 2020
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “that perches in the soul.” The avian image is both lovely and apposite, for as a bird goes winging off at the first loud noise or sight of a predator, so hope—an aspect of desire, a wish that something, and usually something good, will happen—typically flies out the window as often as it lands on one’s shoulder. If something isn’t outright impossible, it’s possible to hope for it, though the likelihood of its happening lessens the closer to impossible it comes: living to one hundred, let’s say, following a life of three packs of smokes and a porterhouse every day.
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