Fiction
King Jay, BooBoo Bae
“Rick and I are trying to get to Costco for bulk pastry to bring to brunch club, but the City Marathon is today and we’re trapped like ants in an ant farm. We’ve been driving idiot circles around our neighborhood for over an hour, and street after street we’re rebuffed by race barricades and stock-looking cops grinning the same dog grin from behind their sunglasses. Sunshine, overtime pay, and runner butts, their faces say, and God Bless America.
Having peered up so many blocked streets into the race lane, it feels less like a marathon and more like a pageant for fifty thousand youngish, whitish professionals. ‘Imagine spending a hundred bucks to run twentysome miles in a row?’ Rick says. ‘Just, like. Why?’ Rick has money and routinely bikes dozens of consecutive miles for fun. He’s just blabbing to distract himself from this race day clusterfuck.
As ever, I play along. ‘It has to be fitness for at least some of them,’ I say. ‘And then the usual stuff? Christmas letter fodder? Hinge bait? At least the registration fees go toward—’
Rick screams and slams on the brakes. He throws his arm protectively across my chest like it would make any difference, which is most of why I love him and all of why I married him.”
The Miracle Part
“The window looks right up onto a Fifth Avenue sidewalk, the angle such that passersby don’t think to look down at you and couldn’t even if they wanted to. The place is one of those half-basement deals they call garden level so they don’t have to put basement in the listing. The rent is great, but that’s not the best part. The best part, the miracle part, really, is the angle you get on folks’ hands from down here. The eyes are the window to the soul, you’d always say, but the hands are the billboards. Lake Fucking Addie. God.
So now imagine you’re by the window, this window, at the table with me and a tuna sandwich of your own, and just look. What do you see?
You see watches set to different time zones, sometimes three or four to a wrist. Where’s that person been, and what up to? See stripes of skin milkfish-pale on ring fingers, wedding bands lustily shucked. Is the wife aware? Is she also out there shucking?”
High Speed
“Then Sundays come. The new wife will be out with the girls. The maples will be edged, the board directed, the hungry fed, the fish all caught, the trash picked up.
Ramirez'll be out back with a neat whiskey on his freshly treated deck. The bird feeders will be full, the tiki torches lit, the water features burbling. Against a red sky he will manage maybe two minutes of stillness before finding something out of place. Two hours later and he’ll still be down on hands and knees, whipping mulch and hostas into ever neater rank and file.
Two more and his merino quarter-zip will be sweated through, the sky now bruised a deep green purple.
A car door will shut and shake the air. Her heels will pock-pock-pock up the drive and through the house.
Into the full dark she will say hon-ey? Hon? Come in for a drink? Please? Five minutes, dear, Ramirez will say. Just five more minutes.”
Janie
“The coast seems clear, so she makes her exit from the car, a svelte little hybrid, reasonable compared to what some of these people drive. The lease is up in March. It’s November now, and Janie has been thinking more and more often about what to do next. Two or three leases ago she leased one and hadn’t spent enough time thinking about lease terms and the stress, gosh, she was in and out of the doctor’s four maybe five times with a dang bleeding ulcer.
Next time an 18-month lease, she thinks. Janie shuts the car door and air from its shutting puffs her carefully twirled lock upward. It settles back down at an angle much different. Her face warms as she appraises a squatter version of herself in the distorted reflection of her car window. She resists re-twirling the lock of hair and tries to work with it, slants her beret slightly, and is now a sort of woman-on-the-go. She turns from the car window, smooths-rumples-smooths again her warmish-day October microfleece jacket, and is ready to begin her walk down the trail.”