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Upstairs, in the master bedroom, my parents accomplish the act. A child’s natural decorum makes me refrain from imagining the scene in much detail. Only this: when they’re done, as if topping off the tank, my father says, “That should do it.”
There’s a scabbard for every dagger,” the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh.)
You used to be able to tell a person’s nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.
Sourmelina’s secret (as Aunt Zo put it): “Lina was one of those women they named the island after.”
They lived in a place called Michigan, where the birds seemed to come in only one color,
Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.
The older immigrants, hearing Lina’s rage, found themselves returning to their childhood in Greece, to memories of their own grandparents’ or parents’ funerals, and everyone agreed that such a display of grief would guarantee Jimmy Zizmo’s soul eternal peace.
In the interest of time, I offer you now a stock capitalist montage.
“I’m sorry, little baby girl,” my mother said in bed, touching her belly and already speaking to me. “I wanted it to be more romantic.” “You want romantic?” said my father. “Where’s my clarinet?”
I could sense the happiness of couples holding first babies and the fortitude of Catholics accepting their ninth.
Finally, in a sign that he was weakening, my father asked my mother, “What do they charge for a baptism these days?” “They’re free.” Milton’s eyebrows lifted. But after a moment’s consideration he nodded, confirmed in his suspicions. “Figures. They let you in for free. Then you gotta pay for the rest of your life.”
a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began.
“That’s my girl,” Milton crowed on the way home. “Pissed on a priest.”
When he tired of making faces, he carried me to the dormer window, where, together, from the opposite ends of life, we gazed down at our leafy neighborhood.
the aorist tense of ancient Greek verbs—a tense so full of weariness it specified actions that might never be completed—Lefty
As far as Desdemona was concerned, death was only another kind of emigration. Instead of sailing from Turkey to America, this time she would be traveling from earth to heaven, where Lefty had already gotten his citizenship and had a place waiting.
Back in Bithynios, where sustained respiration rendered a bachelor eligible, men of equivalent age had successfully asked for the hand of a girl like me.
There was something of the Yale bulldog’s tenacity in our Wolverette, but there was elegance, too. The Wolverette didn’t just play to win. She played to keep her figure.
It was hair that could turn the Medusa to stone,
The humiliation of being a priest in a market economy didn’t plague Father Mike while he was in Greece.
“America betrayed the Greeks!” Jimmy Fioretos jabbed a finger in the air. “It’s that two-faced son of a bitch Kissinger. Shakes your hand while he pisses in your pocket!”
The cedar swamp was an ancient place. No logging had ever been done here. The ground wasn’t suitable for houses. The trees had been alive for hundreds of years and when they fell over they fell over for good. Here in the cedar swamp verticality wasn’t an essential property of trees. Many cedars were standing straight up but many were leaning over. Still others had fallen against nearby trees, or crashed to the ground, popping up root systems. There was a graveyard feeling: everywhere the gray skeletons of trees. The moonlight filtering in lit up silver puddles and sprays of cobweb.
Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
The Object slept on her back. She told me once that back-sleepers were the leaders in life, born performers or exhibitionists. Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to dark perception and the meditative arts.
The chain suggested that some library visitors might take it upon themselves to see that the dictionary circulated.
To walk like a boy you let your shoulders sway, not your hips. And you kept your feet farther apart.