The Truth About the Expulsion
An Address Delivered at the East Orange Women’s Conference First of all, I wanted to go. Adam was the one who wanted to stay. If it was up to him, we’d still be there, spending eternity in mind-numbing peace and tranquility, every day sunnier and cheerier than the previous. Sure, it was Paradise, but Paradise gets old real fast without any contrast. Besides, it wasn’t Paradise with a guy like Adam. Bloated with his First Man persona, he thought it was he and only he who should name all the creatures that walked on land and swam in the sea. And they were the most boring names....
Read MoreA Love Story
Alex felt so doped up with painkillers and anxiety-reducing drugs that when they wheeled him into the operating room, he couldn’t worry, had he wanted to. The one thing he recalled was asking if his wife had been notified. A familiar voice whispered, “I’m here, honey. I’m here,” but too much was going on to make sense of anything. He saw bright lights and people in blue scrubs. Someone told him to count backwards from ten. He reached nine when a new calmness allowed him to block out the image of a car racing through a red light straight toward him. It seemed...
Read MoreThe Cage
because so many wondered what happened … A once beautiful bird sat on a post in a gilded cage. Her claws gripped the post on which she sat. Her cage was made of the finest material. Her days were spent in the dark, only catching a glimpse of the outside world. As the years passed, she could feel time slipping away. Her body aged and she was weak from her burdens. When her cage was uncovered for her regular feeding, the brilliant light blinded her to what the outside world offered. Her keeper, the Lord of the manor, insisted he knew best. Indeed, he was a very important...
Read MoreCookies of Fortune
I scanned the Golden Gate Bridge toting fortune cookies in my backpack, the wind whipping the hair islands encircling my ears and chilling the crown of my head. The elements were unkind to balding men like me. My bushy mustache warmed my upper lip, which didn’t require warming. I had hair everywhere but where I wanted it, where it would have benefited me in becoming a ladies’ man or even a man’s man. I was clownish. But I didn’t mind. I was in the business of making people laugh. I could usually detect the ones I had come for from across the bridge. Their silhouettes, alone and...
Read MoreThe Ark of Memory
Two nurses rooming on the third floor were having a party that evening. One of them had slipped a note under my door, bidding me to come and bring my own bottle. And so, shortly after nine o’clock, I climbed the steps carrying my fifth of Jack Daniel’s. The sounds of laughter and badinage reached me as I climbed, and I arrived on the third floor to find the nurses’ door wide open and guests overflowing into the hallway. The party had reached the point of uninhibited conversation. The kitchen was full of people mixing drinks as they talked and blew smoke, and one man eased past me...
Read MoreAn Actress Prepares
Is that a slow-motion me—my slow-motion hopes, my slow-motion dreams — unraveling? An unraveling, slow-motion me, reaching for, beseeching make believe: Don’t abandon me for reality! Is that the topsy-turvy, twisty, tipsy world of me—unraveled? Is that really me? In real time? Reaching for reality? Is that real-time me still me? In gauzy slumber I lie still and frightened. That final ravel will toll the death of me, of Bryce Maclaine, actually, and my fantastic life, the life of an actress, unraveling now, in torturous time. I can feel reality — with feet like axes — crawling...
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