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I once wept onto bound blank pages and called the result The Book of Tears. I strangled and drowned that soggy volume and titled it Mercy, but this actual knife, here in her daughter’s bed where it was planted by god-knows-who, tells a more urgent story than any on paper. Only a book with a pulse, a temperature, a heft for leverage, and a handle for wielding as a weapon could compete with a butcher’s blade lurking in the bed of a child I don’t dislike. She and her mother had just begun to feel safe after weeks of squatting on a wornout mattress in a corner of Auntie Panty’s studio between a noisy radiator and a litter box. Before that, they’d spent two nights fidgeting in a rented bed at an unaffordable local hotel. Before that, they’d come home from mercy errands to a home that had been their refuge. The bastards hadn’t stolen much, but they’d splintered the front door and run their bleeding hands over everything that was hers, then crapped in the hallway and turned her home against her. She politely informed the police, enlisted me in the reclamation, fled with her daughter to anyplace safe, and languished in exile while I cleaned up. We’re staring now at what stabbed her beneath the covers as she was putting her daughter into bed, as sinister as a turd on the floor but more pointed. I touch her lightly. What chance does language have to blunt such objects or sheathe them, and how can we live without intimacy when items out of place can make the world and not the objects seem so reckless? She extends her arms; I anticipate an embrace, but she’s showing me her wounds. She’s starting a sentence with Since you moved out
Original Copyright © March 08, 2007
Revised Copyright © March 12, 2026
My son pulls a line drive through the gap just about every at-bat. Claims he does it by letting the game happen to him, letting the bat meet the ball. Because bat and ball want to collide, he says, and effort skews the alignment. He wears Eleven, as I did, but in every other way. I’m in the hometown bleachers as he watches the ball into the catcher’s mitt, so patient, his whole life ahead of him to waste; he’ll take three strikes looking if they’re not quite where his bat wants them. I’d still be unmarried and undivorced with that attitude, but the game is easy for Eleven Junior. When I played, I wanted to rocket balls over the fence like a man with a vendetta, but mostly they glanced off my bat into the dugout sending teammates scrambling. When my boy’s hittin’em hard, there’s no better place than the ballpark, but I must do two things at once: observe the game and make stories on my laptop, where I’m the All Star. Tappity-tap. My characters play games I invent from positions I assign. Tappity-tap. Spouses and lovers toe the infield grass, relatives and workfriends pace their outfield patches, each with a part in the pageant, everyone focused on home. Senior is pitching to Junior. He shakes off signs until the catcher surrenders and lets him hurl it. I close my computer. Junior’s at the plate in a Bunt Situation while his coach pointlessly taps his earlobes, testicles, and elbows. Everyone glares at me as if I’d shouted out “Take Him Yard!” instead of just thinking it. Dads and coaches can’t just let the game happen to their kids. I watch him shrug and take another strike and wonder whether what he does will be of any consequence.
Original Copyright © FEB 27, 2007
Revised Copyright © MAR 05, 2026
Very Short Novels 