Tag: matt cavagnero

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.

excerpt from “The Balance”

She flicked the corner of the bright yellow metro card against her thigh.

Click.

Click.

The sound assured her that the card was still there in her palm, as real and tangible as the battered Retro 1’s on her feet and the overstuffed backpack slung across her uneven shoulders.

As long as the card was in her hand then she knew it was real. And if the card was real, then her plans were as well. It was her favorite type of proof — a syllogism; simple but impenetrable. She’d always found comfort in logic. It was her business, after all.

An LED screen spanned the entirety of one of the bus stop walls, cycling through an endless loop of advertisements that framed her face like a digital stage light. The red hues of a bourbon promo synthesized the illusion of blush in her pale complexion. Seize life by the glass with Buckshot Bourbon.

The boozy ad faded into a black screen that hung there for a brief, quiet moment; an electronic exhale that she wished she could stretch until her bus arrived to spirit her away.

The public safety warning that followed the whiskey ad cast a pale white halo over her silhouette. Be mindful of your surroundings, the sign warned her in bold white text against a black slab backdrop. If you see something, say something.

Like a tick, she subconsciously complied, glancing up from her MetroCard and lazily scanning her surroundings. She let her eyes come to rest on nothing in particular until the sensory barrage of Delancey street slipped out of focus, regressing into its most elemental forms: shapes, colors — blurs of movement smearing across her plane of vision. She felt safe and detached as the world recessed away from her and she submerged deeper into her own subconscious, playing the different scenarios of what she had to next in her head.

The pulse of a subwoofer thumped her chest as a black SUV passed by and her mind was dragged reluctantly back into the present.

— Jesus, I’m fucking tired, she said outloud to no one in particular but still wondered if anyone’d heard.

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.