Both girls overdo it with the perfume; they lack subtlety. The landing just outside our bedroom is now a miasma of sweet, with Charlotte’s BF Rosie living here. When Dawn’s gone I stretch out like a starfish in bed but… Read More ›
David Foster Wallace
Rainbows
As a treat to myself for finishing David Wallace’s difficult book I bought another difficult book, JR by William Gaddis, 760 pages of pure dialogue, a book that influenced Wallace. I’d tried reading Gaddis’s first book but gave up and… Read More ›
Unfinished
Dawn and I sat in the car in the Dairy Queen parking lot eating our sundaes with the windows down watching the other cars come and go through the drive thru, all the people in the suburbs walking their dogs…. Read More ›
The end of the tour
Late afternoon naps in mid spring on a Sunday. Dawn, Charlotte and me each doing the same thing in different parts of the house. You go from the dim months of winter to this over-the-top sun and it’s almost too… Read More ›
The Pale King
An hour before dusk the birds start going bananas. Clicking their tongues, chirping, tweeting. The pollen is like lime-green cocaine covering everything. I get to the park so early it’s still dark and the little streams reflect the pale light… Read More ›
The algorithm remembers
It’s an ungodly hour, 4 am. Even the heat hasn’t come on yet so it’s just me and the coffee maker, the odd mechanical sounds of the house idling. But I love this time in the dark to sit with… Read More ›
The area of a square
We are sitting on a swing on the porch of an airbnb in the town where Lily goes to school, Cedar City, Utah. It’s a fine town, though not much of a town. There’s a university which gives it a… Read More ›
The entertainment unto death
I hadn’t gotten sick like that in seven years, with my head in a toilet, and it was the same toilet seven years ago, the last time at my mom’s in 2009, I had to ask Dawn if she could… Read More ›
Rattle my bones all over the stones
Saturday, all of us on damp streets swaddled against the wind coming off Dublin Bay, wandering northeast from our flat past large churches, intersections where the asphalt’s painted LOOK RIGHT, LOOK LEFT, and the people have complexions that remind me… Read More ›
The Grandfather Tree
It’s the Fourth of July and we’re an hour north of Spokane in Eastern Washington, where it’s hot. Brad drew a map showing the way to his cabin, through gates and pathways in the forest. We’re not sure we’re at… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 