Post #3

Photo by William Eggleston

J is for Jackass
Kimberly Wang

I bet he doesn’t surprise you with lunch at work.
I bet he doesn’t buy books for you just because he thinks you’ll like them.
I bet he doesn’t stay up late with you, talking about dreams and death and jumping off the next bridge he sees.
I bet he doesn’t tell you how dark his days are or where the shadows lie.
I bet he doesn’t wake you up by kissing you hard on the mouth.
I bet he doesn’t answer the phone when you call at night.
I bet he walks differently around the kitchen, tapping a new rhythm on the granite island, one you’ve never heard.
I bet he doesn’t rent out hotel rooms for nights together.
I bet he doesn’t take you to the parts of the city that are a stranger to you both.
I bet he doesn’t call you by a different name on the phone any time a co-worker walks by.
I bet he acknowledges you in public.
Hell, I bet he even kisses you.
I bet he calls you “sunshine” in the morning on the days he realizes how lucky he is to have you.
And I bet he is happier with you.

Lucky Strike
Sarah Van Name

"They’re good for your health,” my mama used to say to me. “They’ll keep ya warm.”

She was up to two packs a day by the time I was twelve. Everything in the house – carpet, couch cushions, clothes on their hangers – smelled like smoke. Even the food she made, pale and bland, held that bitter tang.

Margaret used to watch my mama do her hair in the morning. As a boy, I had no time for such things. But sometimes, trying to drag my sister away from the green bathroom counter to assist in a baseball game or tree climbing, I would become entranced by the movement of my mama’s fingers. Quick and thin as knitting needles, they combed and tugged and wrapped the dark strands into a perfect coiffure. When she let down her hair at night, the scent of the shampoo still clung to the inner threads. Her shaken-out hair was the only thing in the house that didn’t smell like smoke.

I never started. She never offered me a cigarette, but she wouldn’t have minded if I had come home with one in hand as long as it hadn’t been taken from her pack. Margaret did just that one day when she was fourteen. I came home to find her sitting with my mama on the couch watching TV. They were looking straight ahead and smoking together. The similarities between them: the almond eyes, San Francisco street slope of the nose, the papery whiteness of the skin on their hands. It was too much. I left the room.

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I came home for a week. The University of Colorado had been good to me. I’d started hiking. I’d met a girl named Samantha entirely unlike my mother and sister – the only daughter of a midshipman in the navy, sturdy and brown. I had resisted going home the summer previous by getting a job as a clerk at a grocery store, the importance of which I had exaggerated to my mother. But Samantha was going home for a family reunion, and Margaret had been asking for me, so home I went.

When I parked my car in the driveway and walked in, the house was empty. Margaret would’ve still been at school, but at this time on a normal Wednesday my mama would be fixing herself a sandwich or doing laundry. There was a note on the counter scrawled in her jagged handwriting. “Out to lunch – Carina’s – meet me 12:15.” I looked at the clock. It was 12:22.

At Carina’s my mother was already sitting in a booth in the corner, her back to me. Her hair was still dark only at the roots, and as it grew upward the sheen of silver grew more and more pronounced in the light of the diner. The cigarette, as always, dangled like the stem of a dandelion from her fingers.

“Hey, Mama,” I said as I slid into the booth opposite her.

“Hello Jared.” She said it like that, grammatically incorrect, no comma, a statement rather than a greeting.

“How’re you doin’?”

She ignored my question and flagged down the waitress, a blonde-haired and slightly pregnant girl I recognized from high school. “Ya’ll ready?” she asked.

“Coffee and an omelette for me,” my mama said without looking at her.

“The lunch special number five for me, please,” I said.

“Comin’ right up.” She walked away, her pigtails bouncing. What was that girl’s name? Melanie, Milly? Mia? The last customer left the diner with a ring of the doorbell. Melinda disappeared into the kitchen. It struck me how odd it was, that a diner would be empty at lunchtime.

My mama turned her head slightly to the left and exhaled smoke. She looked at me directly. “I have cancer in my lungs.”

She pushed the pack of cigarettes across the table.

Maria. That was the girl’s name. Maria.

I shook a cigarette out of the pack. Lit it and breathed my mother’s life into my lungs.