SANDRA CISNEROS (1954–) is a novelist, poet, short story writer, and essayist. Her novel, The House on Mango Street, won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1985. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories won the PEN Center USA West Award for Best Fiction of 1991, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, and was selected as a noteworthy book of the year by The New York Times and the American Library Journal. It was also nominated for Best Book of Fiction for 1991 by the Los Angeles Times. Cisneros has written three volumes of poetry—Bad Boys, My Wicked Wicked Ways, and Loose Woman—the children’s book Hairs/Pelitos, and the novel Caramelo, and she was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and other literary honors, including two fellowships, for fiction and poetry, from the NEA. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Glamour, Elle, Ms., Story, Grand Street, and The Village Voice. Cisneros received her BA from Loyola University and her MFA from the University of Iowa. She shares a home in San Antonio, Texas, with several cats, dogs, parrots, and guest writers.
Never marry a Mexican, my ma said once and always. She said this because of my father. She said this though she was Mexican too. But she was born here in the U.S., and he was born there, and it’s not the same, you know.
I’ll never marry. Not any man. I’ve known men too intimately. I’ve witnessed their infidelities, and I’ve helped them to it. Unzipped and unhooked and agreed to clandestine maneuvers. I’ve been accomplice, committed premeditated crimes. I’m guilty of having caused deliberate pain to other women. I’m vindictive and cruel, and I’m capable of anything.
I admit, there was a time when all I wanted was to belong to a man. To wear that gold band on my left hand and be worn on his arm like an expensive jewel brilliant in the light of day. Not the sneaking around I did in different bars that all looked the same, red carpets with a black grillwork design, flocked wallpaper, wooden wagon-wheel light fixtures with hurricane lampshades a sick amber color like the drinking glasses you get for free at gas stations.
Dark bars, dark restaurants then. And if not—my apartment, with his toothbrush firmly planted in the toothbrush holder like a flag on the North Pole. The bed so big because he never stayed the whole night. Of course not.
Borrowed. That’s how I’ve had my men. Just the cream skimmed off the top. Just the sweetest part of the fruit, without the bitter skin that daily living with a spouse can rend. They’ve come to me when they wanted the sweet meat then.
So, no. I’ve never married and never will. Not because I couldn’t, but because I’m too romantic for marriage. Marriage has failed me, you could say. Not a man exists who hasn’t disappointed me, whom I could trust to love the way I’ve loved. It’s because I believe too much in marriage that I don’t. Better to not marry than live a lie.
Mexican men, forget it. For a long time the men clearing off the tables or chopping meat behind the butcher counter or driving the bus I rode to school every day, those weren’t men. Not men I considered as potential lovers. Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Chilean, Colombian, Panamanian, Salvadorean, Bolivian, Honduran, Argentine, Dominican, Venezuelan, Guatemalan, Ecuadorean, Nicaraguan, Peruvian, Costa Rican, Paraguayan, Uruguayan, I don’t care. I never saw them. My mother did this to me.
I guess she did it to spare me and Ximena the pain she went through. Having married a Mexican man at seventeen. Having had to put up with all the grief a Mexican family can put on a girl because she was from el otro lado, the other side, and my father had married down by marrying her. If he had married a white woman from el otro lado, that would’ve been different. That would’ve been marrying up, even if the white girl was poor. But what could be more ridiculous than a Mexican girl who couldn’t even speak Spanish, who didn’t know enough to set a separate plate for each course at dinner, nor how to fold cloth napkins, nor how to set the silverware.
In my ma’s house the plates were always stacked in the center of the table, the knives and forks and spoons standing in a jar, help yourself. All the dishes chipped or cracked and nothing matched. And no tablecloth, ever. And newspapers set on the table whenever my grandpa sliced watermelons, and how embarrassed she would be when her boyfriend, my father, would come over and there were newspapers all over the kitchen floor and table. And my grandpa, big hardworking Mexican man, saying Come, come and eat, and slicing a big wedge of those dark green watermelons, a big slice, he wasn’t stingy with food. Never, even during the Depression. Come, come and eat, to whoever came knocking on the back door. Hobos sitting at the dinner table and the children staring and staring. Because my grandfather always made sure they never went without. Flour and rice, by the barrel and by the sack. Potatoes. Big bags of pinto beans. And watermelons, bought three or four at a time, rolled under his bed and brought out when you least expected. My grandpa had survived three wars, one Mexican, two American, and he knew what living without meant. He knew.
My father, on the other hand, did not. True, when he first came to this country he had worked shelling clams, washing dishes, planting hedges, sat on the back of the bus in Little Rock and had the bus driver shout, You—sit up here, and my father had shrugged sheepishly and said, No speak English.
But he was no economic refugee, no immigrant fleeing a war. My father ran away from home because he was afraid of facing his father after his first-year grades at the university proved he’d spent more time fooling around than studying. He left behind a house in Mexico City that was neither poor nor rich, but thought itself better than both. A boy who would get off a bus when he saw a girl he knew board if he didn’t have the money to pay her fare. That was the world my father left behind.
I imagine my father in his fanfarrón clothes, because that’s what he was, a fanfarrón. That’s what my mother thought the moment she turned around to the voice that was asking her to dance. A big show-off, she’d say years later. Nothing but a big show-off. But she never said why she married him. My father in his shark-blue suits with the starched handkerchief in the breast pocket, his felt fedora, his tweed topcoat with the big shoulders, and heavy British wing tips with the pin-hole design on the heel and toe. Clothes that cost a lot. Expensive. That’s what my father’s things said. Calidad. Quality.
My father must’ve found the U.S. Mexicans very strange, so foreign from what he knew at home in Mexico City where the servant served watermelon on a plate with silverware and a cloth napkin, or mangos with their own special prongs. Not like this, eating with your legs wide open in the yard, or in the kitchen hunkered over newspapers. Come, come and eat. No, never like this.
• • •
How I make my living depends. Sometimes I work as a translator. Sometimes I get paid by the word and sometimes by the hour, depending on the job. I do this in the day, and at night I paint. I’d do anything in the day just so I can keep on painting.
I work as a substitute teacher, too, for the San Antonio Independent School District. And that’s worse than translating those travel brochures with their tiny print, believe me. I can’t stand kids. Not any age. But it pays the rent.
Any way you look at it, what I do to make a living is a form of prostitution. People say, “A painter? How nice,” and want to invite me to their parties, have me decorate the lawn like an exotic orchid for hire. But do they buy art?
I’m amphibious. I’m a person who doesn’t belong to any class. The rich like to have me around because they envy my creativity; they know they can’t buy that. The poor don’t mind if I live in their neighborhood because they know I’m poor like they are, even if my education and the way I dress keeps us worlds apart. I don’t belong to any class. Not to the poor, whose neighborhood I share. Not to the rich, who come to my exhibitions and buy my work. Not to the middle class from which my sister Ximena and I fled.
When I was young, when I first left home and rented that apartment with my sister and her kids right after her husband left, I thought it would be glamorous to be an artist. I wanted to be like Frida or Tina. I was ready to suffer with my camera and my paint brushes in that awful apartment we rented for $150 each because it had high ceilings and those wonderful glass skylights that convinced us we had to have it. Never mind there was no sink in the bathroom, and a tub that looked like a sarcophagus, and floorboards that didn’t meet, and a hallway to scare away the dead. But fourteen-foot ceilings was enough for us to write a check for the deposit right then and there. We thought it all romantic. You know the place, the one on Zarzamora on top of the barber shop with the Casasola prints of the Mexican Revolution. Neon BIRRIA TEPATITLÁN sign round the corner, two goats knocking their heads together, and all those Mexican bakeries, Las Brisas for huevos rancheros and carnitas and barbacoa on Sundays, and fresh fruit milk shakes, and mango paletas, and more signs in Spanish than in English. We thought it was great, great. The barrio looked cute in the daytime, like Sesame Street. Kids hopscotching on the sidewalk, blessed little boogers. And hardware stores that still sold ostrich-feather dusters, and whole families marching out of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on Sundays, girls in their swirly-whirly dresses and patent-leather shoes, boys in their dress Stacys and shiny shirts.
But nights, that was nothing like what we knew up on the north side. Pistols going off like the Wild, Wild West, and me and Ximena and the kids huddled in one bed with the lights off listening to it all, saying, Go to sleep, babies, it’s just firecrackers. But we knew better. Ximena would say, Clemencia, maybe we should go home. And I’d say, Shit! Because she knew as well as I did there was no home to go home to. Not with our mother. Not with that man she married. After Daddy died, it was like we didn’t matter. Like Ma was so busy feeling sorry for herself, I don’t know. I’m not like Ximena. I still haven’t worked it out after all this time, even though our mother’s dead now. My half brothers living in that house that should’ve been ours, me and Ximena’s. But that’s—how do you say it?—water under the dam? I can’t ever get the sayings right even though I was born in this country. We didn’t say shit like that in our house.
Once Daddy was gone, it was like my ma didn’t exist, like if she died, too. I used to have a little finch, twisted one of its tiny red legs between the bars of the cage once, who knows how. The leg just dried up and fell off. My bird lived a long time without it, just a little red stump of a leg. He was fine, really. My mother’s memory is like that, like if something already dead dried up and fell off, and I stopped missing where she used to be. Like if I never had a mother. And I’m not ashamed to say it either. When she married that white man, and he and his boys moved into my father’s house, it was as if she stopped being my mother. Like I never even had one.
Ma always sick and too busy worrying about her own life, she would’ve sold us to the Devil if she could. “Because I married so young, mi’ja,” she’d say. “Because your father, he was so much older than me, and I never had a chance to be young. Honey, try to understand . . .” Then I’d stop listening.
That man she met at work, Owen Lambert, the foreman at the photo-finishing plant, who she was seeing even while my father was sick. Even then. That’s what I can’t forgive.
When my father was coughing up blood and phlegm in the hospital, half his face frozen, and his tongue so fat he couldn’t talk, he looked so small with all those tubes and plastic sacks dangling around him. But what I remember most is the smell, like death was already sitting on his chest. And I remember the doctor scraping the phlegm out of my father’s mouth with a white washcloth, and my daddy gagging and I wanted to yell, Stop, you stop that, he’s my daddy. Goddamn you. Make him live. Daddy, don’t. Not yet, not yet, not yet. And how I couldn’t hold myself up, I couldn’t hold myself up. Like if they’d beaten me, or pulled my insides out through my nostrils, like if they’d stuffed me with cinnamon and cloves, and I just stood there dry-eyed next to Ximena and my mother, Ximena between us because I wouldn’t let her stand next to me. Everyone repeating over and over the Ave Marías and Padre Nuestros. The priest sprinkling holy water, mundo sin fin, amén.
• • •
Drew, remember when you used to call me your Malinalli? It was a joke, a private game between us, because you looked like a Cortez with that beard of yours. My skin dark against yours. Beautiful, you said. You said I was beautiful, and when you said it, Drew, I was.
My Malinalli, Malinche, my courtesan, you said, and yanked my head back by the braid. Calling me that name in between little gulps of breath and the raw kisses you gave, laughing from that black beard of yours.
Before daybreak, you’d be gone, same as always, before I even knew it. And it was as if I’d imagined you, only the teeth marks on my belly and nipples proving me wrong.
Your skin pale, but your hair blacker than a pirate’s. Malinalli, you called me, remember? Mi doradita. I liked when you spoke to me in my language. I could love myself and think myself worth loving.
Your son. Does he know how much I had to do with his birth? I was the one who convinced you to let him be born. Did you tell him, while his mother lay on her back laboring his birth, I lay in his mother’s bed making love to you?
You’re nothing without me. I created you from spit and red dust. And I can snuff you between my finger and thumb if I want to. Blow you to kingdom come. You’re just a smudge of paint I chose to birth on canvas. And when I made you over, you were no longer a part of her, you were all mine. The landscape of your body taut as a drum. The heart beneath that hide thrumming and thrumming. Not an inch did I give back.
I paint and repaint you the way I see fit, even now. After all these years. Did you know that? Little fool. You think I went hobbling along with my life, whimpering and whining like some twangy country-and-western when you went back to her. But I’ve been waiting. Making the world look at you from my eyes. And if that’s not power, what is?
Nights I light all the candles in the house, the ones to La Virgen de Guadalupe, the ones to El Niño Fidencio, Don Pedrito Jaramillo, Santo Niño de Atocha, Nuestra Señora de San Juan de los Lagos, and, especially, Santa Lucía, with her beautiful eyes on a plate.
Your eyes are beautiful, you said. You said they were the darkest eyes you’d ever seen and kissed each one as if they were capable of miracles. And after you left, I wanted to scoop them out with a spoon, place them on a plate under these blue blue skies, food for the blackbirds.
The boy, your son. The one with the face of that redheaded woman who is your wife. The boy red-freckled like fish food floating on the skin of water. That boy.
I’ve been waiting patient as a spider all these years, since I was nineteen and he was just an idea hovering in his mother’s head, and I’m the one that gave him permission and made it happen, see.
Because your father wanted to leave your mother and live with me. Your mother whining for a child, at least that. And he kept saying, Later, we’ll see, later. But all along it was me he wanted to be with, it was me, he said.
I want to tell you this evenings when you come to see me. When you’re full of talk about what kind of clothes you’re going to buy, and what you used to be like when you started high school and what you’re like now that you’re almost finished. And how everyone knows you as a rocker, and your band, and your new red guitar that you just got because your mother gave you a choice, a guitar or a car, but you don’t need a car, do you, because I drive you everywhere. You could be my son if you weren’t so light-skinned.
This happened. A long time ago. Before you were born. When you were a moth inside your mother’s heart, I was your father’s student, yes, just like you’re mine now. And your father painted and painted me, because he said I was his doradita, all golden and sun-baked, and that’s the kind of woman he likes best, the ones brown as river sand, yes. And he took me under his wing and in his bed, this man, this teacher, your father. I was honored that he’d done me the favor. I was that young.
All I know is I was sleeping with your father the night you were born. In the same bed where you were conceived. I was sleeping with your father and didn’t give a damn about that woman, your mother. If she was a brown woman like me, I might’ve had a harder time living with myself, but since she’s not, I don’t care. I was there first, always. I’ve always been there, in the mirror, under his skin, in the blood, before you were born. And he’s been here in my heart before I even knew him. Understand? He’s always been here. Always. Dissolving like a hibiscus flower, exploding like a rope into dust. I don’t care what’s right anymore. I don’t care about his wife. She’s not my sister.
And it’s not the last time I’ve slept with a man the night his wife is birthing a baby. Why do I do that, I wonder? Sleep with a man when his wife is giving life, being suckled by a thing with its eyes still shut. Why do that? It’s always given me a bit of crazy joy to be able to kill those women like that, without their knowing it. To know I’ve had their husbands when they were anchored in blue hospital rooms, their guts yanked inside out, the baby sucking their breasts while their husband sucked mine. All this while their ass stitches were still hurting.
• • •
Once, drunk on margaritas, I telephoned your father at four in the morning, woke the bitch up. Hello, she chirped. I want to talk to Drew. Just a moment, she said in her most polite drawing-room English. Just a moment. I laughed about that for weeks. What a stupid ass to pass the phone over to the lug asleep beside her. Excuse me, honey, it’s for you. When Drew mumbled hello I was laughing so hard I could hardly talk. Drew? That dumb bitch of a wife of yours, I said, and that’s all I could manage. That stupid stupid stupid. No Mexican woman would react like that. Excuse me, honey. It cracked me up.
• • •
He’s got the same kind of skin, the boy. All the blue veins pale and clear just like his mama. Skin like roses in December. Pretty boy. Little clone. Little cells split into you and you and you. Tell me, baby, which part of you is your mother. I try to imagine her lips, her jaw, her long long legs that wrapped themselves around this father who took me to his bed.
• • •
This happened. I’m asleep. Or pretend to be. You’re watching me, Drew. I feel your weight when you sit on the corner of the bed, dressed and ready to go, but now you’re just watching me sleep. Nothing. Not a word. Not a kiss. Just sitting. You’re taking me in, under inspection. What do you think already?
I haven’t stopped dreaming you. Did you know that? Do you think it’s strange? I never tell, though. I keep it to myself like I do all the thoughts I think of you.
After all these years.
I don’t want you looking at me. I don’t want you taking me in while I’m asleep. I’ll open my eyes and frighten you away.
There. What did I tell you? Drew? What is it? Nothing. I’d knew you’d say that.
Let’s not talk. We’re no good at it. With you I’m useless with words. As if somehow I had to learn to speak all over again, as if the words I needed haven’t been invented yet. We’re cowards. Come back to bed. At least there I feel I have you for a little. For a moment. For a catch of the breath. You let go. You ache and tug. You rip my skin.
You’re almost not a man without your clothes. How do I explain it? You’re so much a child in my bed. Nothing but a big boy who needs to be held. I won’t let anyone hurt you. My pirate. My slender boy of a man.
After all these years.
I didn’t imagine it, did I? A Ganges, an eye of the storm. For a little. When we forgot ourselves, you tugged me, I leapt inside you and split you like an apple. Opened for the other to look and not give back. Something wrenched itself loose. Your body doesn’t lie. It’s not silent like you.
You’re nude as a pearl. You’ve lost your train of smoke. You’re tender as rain. If I’d put you in my mouth you’d dissolve like snow.
You were ashamed to be so naked. Pulled back. But I saw you for what you are, when you opened yourself for me. When you were careless and let yourself through. I caught that catch of the breath. I’m not crazy.
When you slept, you tugged me toward you. You sought me in the dark. I didn’t sleep. Every cell, every follicle, every nerve, alert. Watching you sigh and roll and turn and hug me closer to you. I didn’t sleep. I was taking you in that time.
• • •
Your mother? Only once. Years after your father and I stopped seeing each other. At an art exhibition. A show on the photographs of Eugène Atget. Those images, I could look at them for hours. I’d taken a group of students with me.
It was your father I saw first. And in that instant I felt as if everyone in the room, all the sepia-toned photographs, my students, the men in business suits, the high-heeled women, the security guards, everyone, could see me for what I was. I had to scurry out, lead my kids to another gallery, but some things destiny has cut out for you.
He caught up with us in the coat-check area, arm in arm with a redheaded Barbie doll in a fur coat. One of those scary Dallas types, hair yanked into a ponytail, big shiny face like the women behind the cosmetic counters at Neiman’s. That’s what I remember. She must’ve been with him all along, only I swear I never saw her until that second.
You could tell from a slight hesitancy, only slight because he’s too suave to hesitate, that he was nervous. Then he’s walking toward me, and I didn’t know what to do, just stood there dazed like those animals crossing the road at night when the headlights stun them.
And I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I looked at my shoes and felt ashamed at how old they looked. And he comes up to me, my love, your father, in that way of his with that grin that makes me want to beat him, makes me want to make love to him, and he says in the most sincere voice you ever heard, “Ah, Clemencia! This is Megan.” No introduction could’ve been meaner. This is Megan. Just like that.
I grinned like an idiot and held out my paw—“Hello, Megan”—and smiled too much the way you do when you can’t stand someone. Then I got the hell out of there, chattering like a monkey all the ride back with my kids. When I got home I had to lie down with a cold washcloth on my forehead and the TV on. All I could hear throbbing under the washcloth in that deep part behind my eyes: This is Megan.
And that’s how I fell asleep, with the TV on and every light in the house burning. When I woke up it was something like three in the morning. I shut the lights and TV and went to get some aspirin, and the cats, who’d been asleep with me on the couch, got up too and followed me into the bathroom as if they knew what’s what. And then they followed me into bed, where they aren’t allowed, but this time I just let them, fleas and all.
• • •
This happened, too. I swear I’m not making this up. It’s all true. It was the last time I was going to be with your father. We had agreed. All for the best. Surely I could see that, couldn’t I? My own good. A good sport. A young girl like me. Hadn’t I understood . . . responsibilities. Besides, he could never marry me. You didn’t think . . . ? Never marry a Mexican. Never marry a Mexican . . . No, of course not. I see. I see.
We had the house to ourselves for a few days, who knows how. You and your mother had gone somewhere. Was it Christmas? I don’t remember.
I remember the leaded-glass lamp with the milk glass above the dining-room table. I made a mental inventory of everything. The Egyptian lotus design on the hinges of the doors. The narrow, dark hall where your father and I had made love once. The four-clawed tub where he had washed my hair and rinsed it with a tin bowl. This window. That counter. The bedroom with its light in the morning, incredibly soft, like the light from a polished dime.
The house was immaculate, as always, not a stray hair anywhere, not a flake of dandruff or a crumpled towel. Even the roses on the dining-room table held their breath. A kind of airless cleanliness that always made me want to sneeze.
Why was I so curious about this woman he lived with? Every time I went to the bathroom, I found myself opening the medicine cabinet, looking at all the things that were hers. Her Estée Lauder lipsticks. Corals and pinks, of course. Her nail polishes—mauve was as brave as she could wear. Her cotton balls and blond hairpins. A pair of bone-colored sheepskin slippers, as clean as the day she’d bought them. On the door hook—a white robe with a MADE IN ITALY label, and a silky nightshirt with pearl buttons. I touched the fabrics. Calidad. Quality.
I don’t know how to explain what I did next. While your father was busy in the kitchen, I went over to where I’d left my backpack, and took out a bag of gummy bears I’d bought. And while he was banging pots, I went around the house and left a trail of them in places I was sure she would find them. One in her lucite makeup organizer. One stuffed inside each bottle of nail polish. I untwisted the expensive lipsticks to their full length and smushed a bear on the top before recapping them. I even put a gummy bear in her diaphragm case in the very center of that luminescent rubber moon.
Why bother? Drew could take the blame. Or he could say it was the cleaning woman’s Mexican voodoo. I knew that, too. It didn’t matter. I got a strange satisfaction wandering about the house leaving them in places only she would look.
And just as Drew was shouting, “Dinner!” I saw it on the desk. One of those wooden babushka dolls Drew had brought her from his trip to Russia. I know. He’d bought one just like it for me.
I just did what I did, uncapped the doll inside a doll inside a doll, until I got to the very center, the tiniest baby inside all the others, and this I replaced with a gummy bear. And then I put the dolls back, just like I’d found them, one inside the other, inside the other. Except for the baby, which I put inside my pocket. All through dinner I kept reaching in the pocket of my jean jacket. When I touched it, it made me feel good.
On the way home, on the bridge over the arroyo on Guadalupe Street, I stopped the car, switched on the emergency blinkers, got out, and dropped the wooden toy into that muddy creek where winos piss and rats swim. The Barbie doll’s toy stewing there in that muck. It gave me a feeling like nothing before and since.
Then I drove home and slept like the dead.
• • •
These mornings, I fix coffee for me, milk for the boy. I think of that woman, and I can’t see a trace of my lover in this boy, as if she conceived him by immaculate conception.
I sleep with this boy, their son. To make the boy love me the way I love his father. To make him want me, hunger, twist in his sleep, as if he’d swallowed glass. I put him in my mouth. Here, little piece of my corazón. Boy with hard thighs and just a bit of down and a small hard downy ass like his father’s, and that back like a valentine. Come here, mi cariñito. Come to mamita. Here’s a bit of toast.
I can tell from the way he looks at me, I have him in my power. Come, sparrow. I have the patience of eternity. Come to mamita. My stupid little bird. I don’t move. I don’t startle him. I let him nibble. All, all for you. Rub his belly. Stroke him. Before I snap my teeth.
• • •
What is it inside me that makes me so crazy at 2 A.M.? I can’t blame it on alcohol in my blood when there isn’t any. It’s something worse. Something that poisons the blood and tips me when the night swells and I feel as if the whole sky were leaning against my brain.
And if I killed someone on a night like this? And if it was me I killed instead, I’d be guilty of getting in the line of crossfire, innocent bystander, isn’t it a shame. I’d be walking with my head full of images and my back to the guilty. Suicide? I couldn’t say. I didn’t see it.
Except it’s not me who I want to kill. When the gravity of the planets is just right, it all tilts and upsets the visible balance. And that’s when it wants to out from my eyes. That’s when I get on the telephone, dangerous as a terrorist. There’s nothing to do but let it come.
So. What do you think? Are you convinced now I’m as crazy as a tulip or a taxi? As vagrant as a cloud?
Sometimes the sky is so big and I feel so little at night. That’s the problem with being cloud. The sky is so terribly big. Why is it worse at night, when I have such an urge to communicate and no language with which to form the words? Only colors. Pictures. And you know what I have to say isn’t always pleasant.
Oh, love, there. I’ve gone and done it. What good is it? Good or bad, I’ve done what I had to do and needed to. And you’ve answered the phone, and startled me away like a bird. And now you’re probably swearing under your breath and going back to sleep, with that wife beside you, warm, radiating her own heat, alive under the flannel and down and smelling a bit like milk and hand cream, and that smell familiar and dear to you, oh.
Human beings pass me on the street, and I want to reach out and strum them as if they were guitars. Sometimes all humanity strikes me as lovely. I just want to reach out and stroke someone, and say There, there, it’s all right, honey. There, there, there.