The first hour slips under our wings. The next hour peels paint as it angles us higher and farther from anywhere, locking us out of your homes from 35k feet. We wave through windows, untethered, until, washed up on the rock-strewn shore of our futures, we meet again.
The police offered to take me to the detox center, but I, of course, refused. Why would I even go? So instead I walked to the library, and this lady followed me. I knew she hated me, so I stayed away from her. She gave me the middle finger from across the street even though I didn't do anything. Later she emailed me a picture of herself having sex with three guys and she wrote a description about it all in the email to me. I did not know what to feel. Then I saw one of the guys in her picture sitting in his Mazda3 in the Safeway parking lot looking at his phone and shouting at it super-hard. We all heard it. She must have sent him one of the pictures with me in it.
The young couple paused at the sunny street corner where three cars had reached a four-way stop. The car ahead of them moved first, followed by the car on the right turning left, crossing their path. The man watched the cars move, one by one, without turning his head, fearing that to look and acknowledge the driver would signal his yielding. Meanwhile, two more cars cued up at the intersection. He feared that the responsible caution he thought he was demonstrating for his date now seemed like slow-witted timidity. The sun pumped overhead and focused its energy on him, squeezing perspiration from his brow, his armpits, from his back. Was I supposed to have stepped off the curb and challenge the cars?
She stepped off the curb, offered back her hand and a wink, her eyes a squint in the UV light. A haughty little sigh slipped from his dry mouth—the last little gasp from his car-crushed lungs—then he took her hand, gratefully, and wished he would never have to let go.
School as yet had produced no real friends for Russell, and he worried about that, but Harry Snyder was the boy next door, and so a casual, loafing kind of friendship had been easy to achieve with him. One day they were intently hunkered down over many tin soldiers in the basement of Harry's house when Mrs. Snyder came to the stairs and called down "Russell, you'll have to go home now. Harry has to come up and get ready because we're all going for a drive to Mount Vernon.""Aw, Mom, now? You mean now?""Certainly, I meant 'now.' Your father wanted to get started an hour ago."And that was when Harry went into action. In three swift, merciless kicks he sent soldiers flying in all directions, ruining formations that had been all afternoon in the making and he howled and flailed and cried like someone half his age, while Russell looked away in a wincing smile of embarrassment."Harry!" Mrs. Snyder called. "Harry, I want you to stop this right now. Do you hear me?"But he didn't stop until long after she'd come down and led him tragically upstairs; when Russell crept out for home he could still hear the terrible sound of it ringing across the yellow grass.Even so, there was an important difference. Harry had cried because he wanted his mother to leave him alone; Russell had cried because he didn't—and therein lay the very definition of a mother's boy.
Jack did his best to leave the room quickly but kept veering sideways against the near wall; then he decided it might be helpful to use the wall for support and guidance, letting one shoulder slide heavily along it while he gave his whole attention to lifting and placing his feet in the deep champagne-colored carpet. He knew dimly that Ralph had finished at the fireplace, had lurched past him muttering "Come on" and gone away into the hall, leaving him alone in this treacherously unstable but mercifully open room; he could see too that the bright doorway was very near now—only a few more steps—but his knees had begun to soften and buckle. He thought he could feel his shoulder sliding down the wall, rather than along it; then the tilting yellow carpet came slowly closer until it offered itself up as a logical, necessary surface for his hands, and for the side of his face.
