Tag: fiction

Excerpt from “Jordan”

You’re 12 years old and you live on Jordan St. You can’t find your neighborhood on Google Maps, ‘cause it’s been swallowed up by another neighborhood with a catchier name. They do that so they can put up more new buildings with shiny glass fronts that shine back at you like a black mirror so you don’t ever forget that you’re outside of them.

At least that’s what your sister, Jaimie says. But you don’t know — honestly, you wouldn’t want to live in a building that looked back at you like that. Your building doesn’t. Yours is made of bricks that look like they’ve soaked up a hundred different colors at some point or another and there’s this certain time of day when the sun is going down and the sky can’t make up its mind if it’s orange or brown, and you swear to God that you can’t tell where the top of your building ends and the sky starts. Your dad calls this the magic hour and when you were a little kid you thought he made that up himself and you hoped that one day you could come up with perfect names for little things like that too.

Jaimie says a lot of things, to be honest. Your dad used to say she was thirteen going on thirty, but she’s sixteen now, so you’re not really sure how old that makes her in Jaimie-years.

She’s always been the one in your family. The smart one. The funny one. The she’s-going-places one. You’re still trying to figure out which one you are. At least you’re pretty sure you’re the one that your dog Felix likes the best because you always sneak forkfuls of mac and cheese under the table for him when your mom isn’t looking, and that has to count for something.

Excerpts from “Forty Days”

A year, a whole fucking year. Felt like a decade, but at the same time it felt like the months had all spontaneously combusted, like it was just yesterday that I’d watched Sam’s eyes close. Grey eyes. Brown hair, just like mine. Body diminished into something less than a body. Hollow, weightless, like a bird’s. I could imagine the wind from an open window, he’d asked us to open the window, and I could see the breeze carrying him in its hands, lifting him up, suspending him in motion. I’d wished it would. The wind had my permission to lift my brother from his bed at Mount Sinai, hospital gown and all, and fly him through the window and into the thick orange sky.

***

All the Bedloe’s have some kind of tick. Mine were more sensory – rubbing my face, running my hands through my hair, biting my inner cheek. Adderall makes the ticks come to the surface more, but it also gets me out of bed and helps me sort through the incongruent thoughts, loading them all like small lead pellets into a single shotgun shell. Regulates the headiness of my head. Makes me forget the tiredness in my bones, keeps my boots on my feet, my shirt on my chest, everything in its order, place, fitting the mold I have to fit in order to be a cell in this sea-dwelling organism, Manhattan, to live in my shoe box with its water stains, to take Shay out to dinner now and then, to keep the freezer stocked with middle-tier gin and limes in the fridge and splurge on the $4 organic, mocha, cold-brew, fair-trade, cruelty-free, half-caff, sugar-free, caramel swirl, micro-brewed, iced coffee.

Excerpts from Lego House

She stood in the shadow of a monolith, all of her potential looming over her, and she watched her dreams deliquesce into flickering shadows and murmurs. Her feet would never touch the stage of Lincoln Center, she would never see her name in The New Yorker. The future had rushed past her, leaving her behind, bloodied leg in the road. She was ghosting on an LED screen, a shadow of the past chasing the future.

We step out from St. Marks Church, a balloon animal pops, a child shrieks.

“How was it,” she asks. You were perfect, I say, it was great. I’ll relive this moment again and again. She grips my arm tighter. I’m not sure where we’re walking, but we’re moving east, towards the river.

Do you remember those opening bands, I ask her, when we went to Coney Island?

We walk along the East River, lights casting down from the Williamsburg Bridge, skittering across the dark ripples. We pause at a bench so she can rest her leg. She massages her shin and I see the raised purple scar beneath her jeans in my head.

When I was eight I built a four foot tall Lego replica of the North Tower, cementing each plastic brick in place with a mortar of Gorilla Glue, terrified that a careless limb would knock the whole thing down and spill the dream of it across the floor.

 

****

 

I adjusted my grip to a new spot on the subway beam, fingers seeking the cold side of the metallic pillow. I watched the carousel of lights, sickly green and fluorescent orange whir past the window. Watched the doors rattle in their place, remembered to mind the gap. I looked at Arianna and followed her long limbs to the dried-gum-and-piss floors. Her olive-skin was made a patchwork of the green and orange light that trickled inconsistently into the car as we flew past the fields of girders. Her arm muscles tensed as she clutched her duffle bag, lean strips of trained fibers. Her body was functional, her posture effortless, precise. I liked to watch her stretch before and after her shows, uncoiling the tension in her limbs, preparing them to move in ways that laughed at gravity and conformity and then cooing them like a mother after the fact.

I felt unnatural in my seat as I watched her on the stage. Lazy limbs sinking into the cushions and falling at my sides, heavy and useless, pendulums laid to rest without a fulcrum to swing their great swoops from. These silent beasts are hard to bear.