these grab-bags of peoplefolks and their [re]visions and their lamp-burned eyes and they are all over the place with their twine-wrapped porkloin dreams

Anderson’s sideburns. He combed them profusely, obsessively, in the chipped motel mirror after we watched People’s Court on channel seven (the only channel without distracting amounts of snow, either in the visual or audible variety and the one with that coiffured news-muppet Matt Mattingly). Anderson would stroke them at the most inappropriate time—once, on top of our stained crimson comforter back home, he removed his hands from beneath my bra so he could finger his facial hair instead of my hardening nipple. But he would pet them absent-mindedly too, like at the counter in Denny’s between swills from the pale ceramic mug of decaf; or he would caress them in line at the bank, his eyes wandering to the teller’s towering beehive but not registering its existence.

I see her in my parking lot and I thought she’d looked familiar with those eyelashes.   

Harvey loads the mattress on his back with no problem but then I heard his back and it cracked so loudly my hairs stood on end. 

I used to imagine it was me inside of that buried time capsule instead of those Action Comics and that half-empty pack of filterless Luckies.

He arranges the action figures for the customer.

There had been better days, Raul muttered into his reflection on the stainless steel range hood. The steam from the bubbling pot of basmati was wrinkling his silk tie, painting his forehead with beadlets of sweat, but he couldn’t steal away from his shimmering, steely double. In a skillet next to the rice, two thin veal cutlets, basted in extra virgin olive oil and fresh basil shreds, warmed in their clear juices. A small plasma television beamed up from the marble counters, its silent image of a stock ticker streaming across the polished black surface, a reversed, refracted rendition. Raul didn’t need to decode the flowing current of numbered fractions and three letter acronyms, he lived them everyday; the ebb and flow had turned into, as of late, ebb and ebb: the coast was naked, exposed, parched.

I run into Karl this morning at the car wash.  

I used to imagine that I could run across the pool’s surface water and leap over the other children, splayed out on giant inflatable crocodiles and neon pink intertubes.

She cranes her head to see the drop of rain spread out across her shoulder.   

There had been better days. But those seemed to exist for him so long in the past, years before the border crossing. Thinking of the guards even now, their sullen gray wool, their fur hats, their Kalashnikovs, render him into a state of confused duality: anger and fright. But, he remembers the lessons of his grandfather, those two emotions are one in the same, as the phrase goes. It sounds so commonplace, so trivial, now, here, hundreds of kilometers away from that place, a current place safer but not, magical but not, fertile but not. The Regime, with its ruthless poet Colonel, like every place he would ever reside, he would ever thrust his tired, hunched form across, would remain in the shaded limbo between good and evil.  The Banal flows. 

He is running right into the lake and I’d expected him to topple any minute now. 

I used to imagine that it was a hailstorm that caused the awning at Franklin's Hardware to turn into a Swiss cheese-like canvas of gaping holes and elliptical slashes and not the knife-wielding Franklin.

There had been better days; frankly, she couldn’t wait until the day to utter such words. Indeed, the truth was that she had never been able to view a single thing through the lens of such pessimism; and such were the words of the anti-optimist: there had been better days. The type of phrase that leached out from pursed lips, from shaking and sallow heads; a front porch lament to a young neighbor’s child in a shifting neighborhood, a deathbed confession in a forgotten wing of a forgotten retirement home. Maybe. But it was not in her make-up, her nature prevented such musings, such ill-guided generalities. She had yet to feel remorse and all of remorse’s varied, inbred kin, drop in for a visit, no matter how brief or how long. 

I used to imagine that the bark on freshly-planted trees could be peeled off in one continuous act like my grandmother used to be able to do with an apple skin.

But then he started doing lines every morning. He eventually stopped going to class. Now he works at the Chevron on South 8th and Vineland.   

But then she started shaving her head. I told her to stop that trend. We broke up.

I used to imagine that Curious George would one day come out with a story where he would mercilessly maul his handler, that asshole in the giant yellow hat.

The picnic tables fill up by nine. The bar inside: forget it. There is a line for the dart board, and the bathroom and the pool table, and the water jug.  “Where to?” Frank frowns.  New lines carve and others rise upon his left forearm from the heft of the glass pitcher there in his hand.  A two-person plastic table in a far corner opens up. Frank sets down the pitcher, the amber beer sloshes around a bit but stays within the rim.  “Are you still not drinking?” he asks.  “Not since the appointment,” I open my soda can. The hiss turns more than a few heads.

But then the group ate there two or three times a week. The place started getting a following again. The new location opened up North last week.

But then she started putting the gun in her purse. Her neighbor had said that was a bad idea.

She is cleaning up trash on the side of the road now for every weekend of the next eight months.

But then he started changing all his light bulbs. His obsession was ceaseless. Now we only use candles.

I see her now across from me and I open my mouth. 

He pushes the revolving door with so much gusto the panel behind him clips his heel. 

Yuri ponders the dynamic between the rook and the queen and I panicked and jumped at the thought of defeat.

They stare into each others faces but he lost the concentration first.