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See Spot Run

4/24/2016

BY CAROLYN SMUTS

"Your form is crappy today, Buddy," I said to Kyle as we jogged along. We were only a mile into the New Year's Day 5k and he looked like he was dying. The sweat pants he wore made him look skinny—malnourished, almost.

"Mom, I feel like total crap. Just go. I'll see you at the finish. I’m dying."

"Bub, it’s your first real 5k; I’m not going to leave you. Let's just get this over with. We're almost half finished already."

We trudged along and finished 10 minutes slower than our regular training runs. I fought being pissed--this race was Kyle’s idea and I felt like he didn't even try; he seemed distracted the whole jog.

Oh, well. So I was out $50 bucks. I got to spend the morning with my 12-year-old son and we both had new matching boxy t-shirts emblazoned with Chiropractic advertisements. It was money well spent in my book. I was thrilled Kyle seemed interested in my sport; distance running isn't the most exciting activity and it forced my introverted boy to hang out with me and almost chat for full 30-minute blocks of time. I really thought our relationship grew during our two months of training.

"Mom, can I talk to you about a personal issue? I mean, a sex issue?"

We were 10 minutes into our drive home from the race and the car interior suddenly seemed vacuum-sealed. Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground were on the radio asking me What Goes on in My Mind, but I reached up and silenced them so I could hear what the hell was going on in my son's pre-teen mind.

Blind Ambition

4/17/2016

BY PAUL HOSTOVSKY

As any self-respecting, braille-literate, technologically savvy blind person will tell you, braille refreshes. As for me, I’m sighted and it certainly refreshed me when I was down and out and working a dead-end job in a Boston delicatessen and crying over my unfaithful college girlfriend who had no allegiances except to beauty in all its masculine forms.

It was the late 1970s, before the invention of refreshable braille, before the passage of the ADA, before there was braille on signage and on elevators and on ATMs, and before there were ATMs. I had heard of braille, of course; I vaguely knew it was what blind people used for reading. I think I even knew that it was named after some blind guy from France. But I’d never actually seen it. In that sense, it was like many things in the world that I had heard of but never laid eyes on: enriched uranium, Timbuktu, quarks, baobabs, braille, etc.

I was vegging out in my ground-floor apartment one mildewy fall afternoon with nothing to do and nada to smoke, looking around desultorily for an orphaned roach in the ashtrays, when I caught the unmistakable scent of cannabis coming from somewhere out in the hallway. I could hear a sort of clicking-sweeping-whacking sound interspersed with cries of merda and when I opened the door to my apartment, there was this blind guy with a joint in one hand and a stick in the other (I would later learn that the stick is properly called a cane) hopelessly lost in the infinity of the vestibule.

Butcher's Hook

4/10/2016

BY DAVID PULLAR

In another life, I think I would have been a butcher. There’s something so soothing in those steaks, ribs and roasting pieces, the way their overflowing piles remind me of the bounty of the land. Even as a customer, being surrounded by robust slabs of meat, awash in a sea of mauves and ochres, I take on a Zen-like calm. As a butcher, I’m sure my passion would be so contagious that I would send customers home laden with produce they had never intended to buy. The main downside is that this other, more butchering life would have to be one in which I was not with Natalie. And I quite like Natalie.

She’s not a judgmental person. If anything, she is the more open-minded of the two of us. Nor has she ever insisted that I abstain from meat, at least not entirely. However, living with a vegetarian and sharing a kitchen described by real estate agents as “compact”, I’m just not able to consume meat on the day-to-day. Even eating out carnivorously isn’t simple. I still can’t shake the mental image of the candle-lit dinner we shared, when Natalie wrinkled her snub nose every single time I took a bite of steak. She didn’t say anything, and it might simply have been a well-timed subconscious reaction to some restaurant aroma, but I took the hint anyway.

My main opportunity to indulge my meat-seeking side has been with Natalie away on business. Every few months, her employer would send her to their offices interstate, pay for her (vegetarian) meals and put her up in nice hotels. During those glorious weeks, I would be free to cook up a meat-storm in the kitchen. I’d invariably go shopping the first night, returning with a dazzling array: sirloin, duck breast, lamb shoulder. I wouldn’t even look up recipes first; my instincts would guide me. Armed with spices, rubs, and marinades, I would design a meal entirely around the centerpiece – the slab of farm beast on my kitchen counter.

How We Forgot To Hang Up The Towels

4/3/2016

BY BRIAN WRIGHT

We didn’t hang up the towels. We forgot to let the dog out. We forgot to get a dog. The dog wasn’t housebroken properly. We couldn’t get the dishes clean enough. We drank too much wine. We didn’t drink enough wine. We didn’t drink enough good wine. We didn’t appreciate the good wine when we had it because we drank too much of it.

We should have had kids. We couldn’t have kids. We couldn’t have kids because of the thing we couldn’t talk about. We couldn’t talk about not having kids because then you would remember why you hated me so much. You hated me so much you decided to marry me. You married me because you forgot how much I hated you. You married me because I wasn’t good enough for anyone else. We let the Hollandaise curdle and the boiling water trick couldn’t fix it.

We let sex become work. We worked so hard at sex because you couldn’t have children. You couldn’t have children so what was the point of having sex. You couldn’t have children so what was the point of work. We did pointless work and we hated it here so we went someplace else. It was cold here so we went someplace warm. It was warm there so we went someplace cold. It smelled funny there so we went someplace else. When we went someplace else the people didn’t know us. We came back here and the people didn’t know us either. The people here were all people we didn’t want to know. All the people we wanted know were someplace else.

See Spot Run

Blind Ambition

Butcher's Hook

How We Forgot To Hang Up The Towels

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