‘If’

If I say ‘if’, a condition is placed. There will be consequences. If these demands are not met, if it doesn’t rain, if you loved me, if you do that one more time, if we lived in the best of all worlds, if two cars drove straight toward each other, one at 20 one at 40...

Cellular Memory

Ted and Sarah live near a silky sand beach. They never go to the beach, a convenient ten minute drive. They could go. But they don’t. They do not discuss going on a sunny day and decide not to go. The question doesn’t come up. What prevents them from enjoying...

Swiss Cheese

The distinctive thing about Swiss cheese, the gorgeous holes, the gas fermenting bubbles leaving hollows, shaped emptiness.  Some lacy. Some perfect spheres. Some amoeba-like, amorphous.  Swiss cheese, notable for what is not there. Yet we buy it not for nothing but...

Stiff

I’ve never liked meringue. Always have. The way it stiffens being whipped, lingers on the lip like a fish hook, exotically sweet like India in 1930’s romantic movies, the sari draped girl wearing dark eyes, and her young lover, a raj or something, wearing a jeweled...

Monuments, Paris, 2016

Out the window of a bus, a small human drama, a man and his mother sit at a sidewalk café. His eyes are smeared with tears and smoke. She crushes out her cigarette and gestures for him to move closer. He scoots his chair to hers, drapes his arms around her scarf...

Love on Mars

There are not that many unlike things scattered about the universe and one of them is iron, scooped up by the Rover, in the crust of Mars. Who would have expected to discover this common earth thing there, in that distant world which I assumed would be much stranger...