In Passing: A collection

Excerpts from this collection:

Of course, I was the first to jump in, diving, shouting, choking. Others joined me. I am not a strong swimmer. The ferry circled around. Ropes were launched, hooks, lifebuoys. Something clocked me in the head and I have a scar where eight stitches were neatly tied. When they pulled me back in, someone asked what happened. I reasoned that it was the batting in his clothing, at once thick enough to keep him warm and yet suddenly a sponge heavy enough to drown him. He was barely a month old, not even strong enough to gasp, or fight. Against an All Blue Sky

George beat my mother to death without laying a hand on her. He just wore her out with his largeness, his arrogance, his jabs, his taunts. He moved through the house like a deranged locomotive who thought himself better than tracks. She holds me tightly, spooning me in her bed, weeping silently, whispering to me. The smell of her is so sour, so strong, that I stop up my ears and do not listen to her as she fades away. In the middle of the night, when I am dragged from her arms, groggy, barely in the world, I do not know that she has left it. Love of Kings

Right now, you are driving the beige Dodge Charger that Trevor bought instead of paying his student loans. One wiper grates across the passenger side and leaves a smear. The other wiper is no better, but that has more to do with the precipitation, which is neither snow nor rain but some sticky wet muck that blurs the road enough to remind you of the feeling you have almost all of the time with Trevor. Well, not at first, because at first it is never like that. At first, it is like a red, red rose. At first, it is all infatuation and flutter. Only afterwards is it a blurred intensity that falls somewhere between hatred and addiction. An itch you cannot scratch. A cliché. But, the precipitation is a metaphor. No, the precipitation is pathetic fallacy. A portent of things to come. And even though it is April, there might still be snow. \a simple function\

Eva moves deliberately, as though meaning to pass directly through from the kitchen to the bedroom. She stops. Not without intention, but casually, accidentally. She stands at the edge of the living room and touches the back of the brown easy chair they found at the Salvation Army Store so many years ago. Eva watches her husband, lost as he is in the soccer match. Prisoners

At the morgue, the assistant funeral director washes their bodies. I imagine this is what he does because at the service the caskets are both open. The boxes are deep and I do not look in. One is smaller than the other, and this one, this one, I can't even look at it. I stay across the room. Someone has removed the pine lids and tucked the two coffins close together so mother can be with son. Missing Pieces

No man in my life has ever been anything more than poison. These are the details, well inside the broad strokes now, the micro-bits of what I've figured out. There are no little blue lines showing through on the canvas. There is only the jaundice paint and it is pushed on heavy. Stroke after stroke of colour so that nothing below bleeds through. I photograph the dust, the threads fallen from the mattress, the grout separated from the glass. A bit of mould on old cheese. This is how we destroy the self we do not tolerate. Find a detail and enlarge it until it is inedible, unrecognizable as the thing it once was. Destroy its context until all meaning is robbed from it. Illuminate the meaningless because the masquerade is all there is. The Cucumber Watcher