Modus Operandi
The madras dragon with the dog-gold eyes is waving. And so, once again, I go to his table. The dark-haired young man stood in the back of the restaurant. Leaning against the wall abutting the kitchen, he loosened his copper-toned bow tie, smoothed the wrinkles in his matching cummerbund and pleated trousers, and contemplated the restaurant’s ubiquitous brownness from beneath the glow of the wall’s torchiere light fixture. If not for his white shirt, he thought, he could blend in with one of the mahogany, faux-leather booths. A complete and perfect...
Read MoreThe Decree
He was the devil, plain and simple. This was true for our community, for our generation. As I sat in my aunt’s good living room in the suburbs of Toronto, my attention focused on Ammar Rizvi, it was the farthest thing from my mind. Us “kidz” were just lounging. The musicians had not yet arrived, and when they did, it would take them some time to tune their instruments and begin the qawwali. Our parents were already in the large finished basement; men on one side, women on the other. They would sit on plush carpet and pillows; laughter and traces of Urdu conversation making its...
Read MoreNumerically Speaking
Two. Pounds of dark chocolate that I ate slowly that Saturday morning while analyzing the e-vite that my ex-boyfriend, Andre, sent me. Forty. The pounds gained since I last saw him six months ago. Five. The ex-girlfriends on the 50-person invitation list. After the last piece, I dialed my friend, Mattie. “I’ve been invited to Andre’s 50th birthday party slash housewarming. His artist colony now has 15 members and is officially open to all lost Cincinnati artists with angst who need guidance and inspiration. And he’s invited several ex-girlfriends. But why am I surprised?...
Read MoreThe Broken Cross
(part one of a series) 1 The stone cross lay like a fallen monument on the lawn of Lorrence, New Jersey ’s Holy Trinity Church, the Episcopal parish of my boyhood. For my friends and me, the cross was our pebbled platform — so many pebbles that we wondered how many were sealed together in this ten-foot crucifix barrier between the lawn and walkway to the church’s traditional red door. “I’m thinkin’ twenty thou,” said my friend Joey Wicklund one spring Sunday as we stood on the cross’s two-foot wide base before 9:30...
Read MoreThe French Teacher
“You must not forget the accent aigu!” instructed Bertrand. “Je vois que vous le faites habituellement.” He was wearing his usual tormented expression. Had anyone ever told him about it? And what was it that seemed to worry him so? “Je suis désolée,” Julianne said. “I will try to remember.” She was paying for these French lessons with her parents’ Christmas present, which every year consisted of the same sized check, and for which, considering the rise in food and gasoline prices, she was grateful. In August,...
Read MoreKissing Peter Tork
Every once in a while, I still look at people on the street and subtract forty years, trying to unearth that summer when I was twelve; a summer that goes dormant for a time, but never disappears. Sometimes I shake my head, needing to decide whether the memory is real or a figment of my imagination; but always her face comes into focus, and I know the image is true. It was at one of those rundown rustic affairs in the Poconos that they make summer camp movies about. Once a week, every Saturday except parents’ weekend, the girls’ camp from across the lake would come to...
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