Life In A Novel

The trouble started when the lightbulbs began to burn out in the novel.

The author never replaced them. We realized we were on our own and could do

whatever we wanted. I was originally just another nobody in an overcrowded

paragraph: a stranger with “a distant look on his face” carrying “a black umbrella”

who passes the happy couple in the street. Now I’m the only character left.

Digging graves in the cold hard ground with my umbrella. I’m afraid the next

person who picks up this novel off the shelf will die of shock after seeing what

we’ve done to ourselves.

* * *

Brief Case

One morning a man, walking to work, drops his briefcase open on a

sidewalk and notices the mess it makes. He spends the rest of the day falling in

love with the spilled contents of his brief case. He decides to leave his wife and

family.

Not wanting to pick the contents off the ground, the man builds a small

house on the sidewalk for the two of them. In the privacy of his own home, he

impregnates the spilled contents of his brief case.

His friends think it has gone too far. They say…. They don’t know what

to say. They think he should keep the spilled contents of his brief case as a

mistress, nothing more.

My friends think I should leave you, the man says to the spilled contents

of his brief case one morning in bed. What do you think? Do you love me?

There is no answer. The spilled contents of his brief case can’t talk, but if

it could, it would say, I’m late for work.

The man thinks the spilled contents of his brief case is keeping something

from him. It never says a word to him and he doesn’t know how to take the

silence.

I am late for work, I am late for work, the spilled contents of his brief case

quietly says, whenever the topic turns to love.

* * *

From A Winter Journal

Clouds pass over the intersection like gigantic fortune cookies. Filled with

blank snowflakes predicting our future. I stare through the window at the cars

parked by the side of the road, smeared with dirt and dark slush; large potatoes

dug up from the earth, still covered with soil.

I see a tree on the other side of the street with a cold, shriveled leaf

trembling from the tip of a branch like a water-drop clinging to the faucet. The

clock’s slow-motion jackhammer breaks apart the hour’s pavement. I am thirty-

one years old, but the moment swallows me like a toad swallowing a newly

hatched fly.

The .bicycle no one seems to own, half-covered with snow, chained to the

streetlamp. I keep glancing at it throughout the day to see if it needs help … as if

it is an animal … some sort of strange re-incarnation of myself….