a text message from the past and a friend gone and from the here and now

He texted me—

I have had some weird dreaming trends lately. It weird because in a way it lasts all night and is absolutely meaningless other than the brain power it must burn. I come in and out of sleep, roll from side to side to get comfortable. As I come to and go back down, I am faced with a near impossible problem to solve, that even though I normally realize this will just go away when I wake up, I become obsessed with solving. It could be very visual. Like some sort of Iron Man movie user interface. Or, some very technical mystery of why something isn't turning on. But, I will dream of this ALL night long. It's almost painful. I’ve never come to a resolution that I can remember. All I know it [sic] that it will end when my alarm clock goes off and I have to get up to do life...

Please tell me but don’t tell me. It’s too much, and I have so much to say but want to say it all only in person. Please get me out of this sunrise shootout where we all get written off again. The saddest summer has no shape because grief is shapeless.

about living her life

The house was full of fucked-up people. The landlord lived seven minutes away. A girl moved in, wanting the excitement, a house with seven wild roommates. But it was bad. One tenant killed somebody in his room. She listened to the beaten-to-death guest choke on his own blood on the other side of the wall. Now she hears the noise he made all the time. She listened to the police interview a couple of other tenants outside, heard this through her window. She moved back in with dad. For old dad, she thought, what couldn’t be measured on a gauge—pounds per square inch, mileage, fluid ounces—could hardly be said to exist at all. So it was with all her trauma—she felt alone, and she hungers to make the sound of death herself.

a note about Ms. Kitty

 

One day in second grade, I learned we had a cat. Dad found her or got her for free somewhere, I guess. We called her Ms. Kitty because that was the name a vet put on the paperwork when she was vaccinated. She was mean as hell except to my dad and me. We could pet her and hold her, but nobody else could. She would nap on my bed or sleep on dad's newspapers. When she had kittens, she got even meaner. One day my older sister brought over a boyfriend and his big, dumb German Shepherd. Ms. Kitty ran right out the door to confront the dog on the back patio, springing, claws out. I still remember bright red blood dripping off the stunned dog's rubbery black nose.

 

something about going to Tulsa

Mr. Barnes,

I went to Tulsa once, more than 25 years ago, to visit my sister. She and her husband had just moved there so he could die near where he was born. He was diagnosed with cancer a few months into the marriage. The last time I saw him, he was in a hospital bed in Dallas, and his head was deformed and exploding with his disease. That visit was goodbye.

A few weeks later, I was pulled out of Spanish class so my family could join my widowed sister's side. I rode to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the back seat of my other sister's boyfriend's coupe—a Camaro. I felt the giddiness, nervousness, and melancholy one feels when one doesn't know what else to feel. But the mood in the Camaro was fine, with my other sister and her boyfriend magnetically alive and well. They seemed happy. Those two had great chemistry, like cocaine and alcohol.

In Tulsa, we found my parents, who had arrived from Dallas to console the inconsolable. My sister, 22, tragic, had been living with death in a strange city, and now death left her alone in that house. So she grieved, and we offered our presence as comfort. Little did I understand of sadness and grief.

something about "The Thanksgiving Visitor" by Truman Capote

The Thanksgiving Visitor returns to the childhood days Truman Capote wrote about in his previously published semi-autobiographical short story, A Christmas Memory. This time, a schoolyard bully, Odd Henderson, menaces young Buddy. To his horror, Buddy's older cousin, Sook, invites Odd to Thanksgiving dinner in hopes of ending the boys' feud. At dinner, Buddy attempts to publicly humiliate Odd, but this revenge scheme fails. Buddy learns about cruelty, the lesson of Two Wrongs, and the dignity of empathy.

After his failed attempt at revenge, Buddy sulks in the shed. Capote writes:

The door to the shed was ajar, and a knife of sunshine exposed a shelf supporting several bottles. Dusty bottles with skull-and-crossbone labels. If I drank from one of those, then all of them up there in the dining room, the whole swilling and gobbling caboodle, would know what sorry was. It was worth it, if only to witness Uncle B.’s remorse when they found me cold and stiff on the smokehouse floor; worth it to hear the human wails and Queenie’s howls as my coffin was lowered into cemetery depths.

Note: The Thanksgiving Visitor was first published in the November 1967 issue of McCall's magazine.

(posts) a doodle

Children

There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

The path around the backyard

Watered, green escape; a little unkempt but altogether perfect. Garden beds along the path hugging in the grass. Clothesline, birdbath, roses and dogwood. The big pecan tree and shade freckled with sun. Even back then this was already a place protected in the warm trust of memory. Greened my hands with the broken skins of unripe pecans smashed against the tree trunk. Grandpa's Lava soap cleaned my hands, and his knowing it would was better than my hands returned unstained

 

Starve

 
He's about nine, curly hair and brown skin, and I saw him climbing out of the creek with two small, pale fish on a line.

Wow!

It wasn't hard, he said, confident. I put the line in and they swam right to it.

Cicadas suffocated us in the heat. Man. What are you gonna do with them?

I don't know.

I had the impression he wished he had a better answer. But I thought, No, I get it. Perfect answer to a stupid question. Fishing was something to do. The fish are beside the point.