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My boyfriends call these positions A Great Opportunity, but they’re company men. They carry comedic mugs to their offices and leave them on their desks overnight, little pools of sludge staining the ceramic bottoms. In the coffee grounds I divine their fortunes: my boyfriends will go gray at these same desks while purchasing cubicle-sized funeral plots.
I worry about those poor, abandoned mugs. How sad they must feel, how lonely, left to sit in their own filth. I worry about living the life of an unwashed vessel. The mold that fissures the leftover coffee, floating like a lily pad on forgotten dregs.
I consider my deepest wish. There are days I think I’ve achieved it, and then it’s gone, like a sneeze that gets swallowed.
None of my boyfriends live with me, but some of their weekend sweaters do—pilling, furry creatures in my closet of corporate attire. I occasionally return the wrong sweater to the wrong man, but they don’t notice.
Her nails are always painted with a sparkly glitter polish, fingertips flashing from below her neutral sleeves like hidden constellations peeking through the clouds.
The labor is always worth the result; they transform my limbs into calligraphy.
“Never would Darla brew herself some coffee,” says the executive assistant, “then retrieve the coffee and leave the old grounds sitting there for no purpose other than to prevent someone else from easily brewing a fresh pot of coffee. Never would Darla not brew a fresh pot after she had enjoyed her own coffee, and this is the most important bit, write this down: Never would she claim credit for the new, fresh coffee she brewed, for a fresh pot of coffee without credit is like a love note in your locker—it’s just magic, and if you take credit, you might as well not have made any coffee in the
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Their bad deeds. Their good deeds. An old lady carrying groceries. A dog stuck in a tree. “Isn’t it usually a cat stuck in a tree?” I ask. “That’s what makes my deed especially good!” says the woman who rescued the dog in the tree.
Does it matter who stirs the pot if someone else serves the stew?
Just because something is familiar does not mean it is mine.
“She’s awake!” my rock neighbor says. “What’s happening?” I ask, my throat raw. “What’s happening?” “Don’t strain your voice, dear.” “Who are you? Where am I?” “You’re on our rock, sweetie. You’ve been enlisted as a human barnacle by the Wildlife Preservation Initiative. Remember?” My rock neighbor is an older woman with shells cluttering her hair. She notices me noticing her shells. “I’m Barnacle Betty, but you can call me Joan. I’m trying to build a convincing crust.”
These days, all my boyfriends are long-distance. But then again, so is the length of an arm stretched between two people watching each other from afar.
We would fall asleep on a pile of papers and I would wake up with a headache and a stomachache and a bitch hangover, which is the kind of hangover you get in the morning after spending the whole night talking shit, saying crap, acting like a huge and massive jerk, allowing all the horrible things in your head to somehow make their slimy way out of your mouth.
I leave Carl’s buddy and wish him luck and hold my breath through the scheme detector, patent pending, the sorrow detector, the intrigue detector, and the metal detector
When a temp dies before the steadiness, it’s said she’s doomed to perform administrative work for the gods in perpetuity.
Weekends visiting my mother at her grave, I lay splat, flat on my back. I sometimes bring a picnic. I always go alone. I sometimes write things down. To tell her what happens exactly, specifically, in detail, While She Is Out.
“Kicked out of the ocean for changing the emotional pH of my sector. My feelings were killing all the surrounding aquatic life. I have that effect on people, and apparently also on shrimp.”
Longitudes and latitudes for everything I love.
The story of the baby otter and the baby giraffe and their unlikely friendship?
Please ma’am, have a pamphlet. Take it in your hand and pull it through your door and put it away. Forget about it for a year, then remember and find it in a folder full of takeout menus and old to-do lists. Struggle to read the pamphlet and struggle to touch the pamphlet. “Ouch!” you’ll say. “I can’t deal with this right now!” you’ll say. “It hurts in a way I can’t describe!” Put the pamphlet back into the folder, put the folder away, and label the folder IMPORTANT, then repeat those steps year after year, new haircut, new house, new husband, new haircut, new car, new husband, until the
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None of the things we used to do make sense anymore, but I guess we both still drink water.
The empty space a person leaves behind retains heat; a retina will preserve a face for later.
I tell him the story of how to bake a pie. I tell him the story of the daily news. I tell him the story of how he was born, which he has to tell me first. “It was a dark and stormy night,” he explains, snug under his sheets. “Really?” “Yes, really. Sometimes it really is.”
They noticed the absence of microwave-safe pottery and hollowed their bodies into bowls, plates, mugs, forgotten, and left to sit in their own filth.
They noticed the continuous departures of kindness and sloughed their skins to wear their hearts on their sleeves as reminders. They always noticed, with relief, prodigal kindness making its inevitable return.
I’ve never felt qualified for anything other than lacking qualifications. When I water my plant, I feel especially unqualified, because she’s always on the brink of death.
In your leather-bound planner, you frequently refer to feeling like a fossil. Can you elaborate? I mean to say that I’m a literal fossil. I’m a rock formation, holding many impressions from many objects, many beings, many times. I am a walking remembrance.
