Excerpt

Excerpt

A passage about distraction from "Samsara," a short story of about 5,000 words written for class. 

***

Since her daughter entered college, she had a lot of time on her hands. What had originally been a text message a day turned into a word only every once in a while turned into nothing at all. And nothing was the worst. In many ways, no word, no trace was worse than the worst thing that could ever happen to a young woman living on her own for the first time.

There were tall hedges by the side of the house. These Lois cultivated religiously. She cut them down to size in great spiraling designs, with lampshade silhouettes, pear form. During that period when the police called every day to inform her about the ongoing missing person’s investigation carried out in her daughter’s name, Lois got creative with the yard work. She stood out on the lawn and routinely sculpted them—really just trying to maintain her domestic sphere—until the day her husband called out from the porch that if Lois didn’t leave the hedges alone, there would be nothing left.

Lois’s husband had a good job. A good job was a stable one, and a white-collared, briefcase-carrying, financial analysis managerial position with an investment firm on the Street was stable. It was constant right down to the late hours he worked on the odd days of the week, the sultry Dior he carried home on his sleeve to a wife feigning sleep in the dark.

On the weekends, Lois’s husband stayed home. With his jackhammer and chisel, he took it upon himself to break up all the cement surrounding the den, dig several feet into the foundation of the house, and reroute the water lines. After that, he patched everything up with fresh concrete mix. Then he needed to throw out the fireplace. Replace the carpet with hardwood. Repaint the walls.

Lois didn’t read the news, only cut vegetables for the slow cooker beside the kitchen phone. Down by Stony Brook, students made ribbons and buttons and put up fliers. Pressured for real information to release to the public, the press ran stories about the candlelit vigils, the classmate testimonials, and SUNY’s history of violence.

Parody of my relationship with my Irish boyfriend.

Fall of the Wayward Wunderkind, painted in a pretty unstable frame of mind, given to my friend Aaron, who's a pretty unstable kind of guy. 

I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worse suspicions: that everything's for sale, and piecemeal.

"Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing" by Margaret Atwood

Photojournalism at its best, by Brennan Anderson with Nate Bartlett.  

The burrito was good, but I believe this kid can actually get on the roof of anything.  

“Marie sometimes did more than merely write. In 1999, in East Timor, she was credited with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children who were besieged in a compound by Indonesian-backed forces. She refused to leave them, waving goodbye to 22 journalist colleagues as she stayed on with an unarmed UN force in order to help highlight their plight by reporting to the world, in her paper and on global television. The publicity was rewarded when they were evacuated to safety after four tense days.

This was the essence of Marie’s approach to reporting. She was not interested in the politics, strategy or weaponry; only the effects on the people she regarded as innocents. ‘These are people who have no voice,’ she said. ‘I feel I have a moral responsibility towards them, that it would be cowardly to ignore them. If journalists have a chance to save their lives, they should do so.’

The people of East Timor did not forget their saviour. At the end of her Sunday Times report about her Sri Lankan experience, she wrote: ‘What I want most, as soon as I get out of hospital, is a vodka martini and a cigarette.’ Later that week, having moved briefly to a New York hotel, she was woken by a room-service waiter bearing a tray with a huge bottle of vodka and all the ingredients for her drink of choice. She discovered it had been ‘fixed, God knows how, by the East Timor crowd, the people in the compound’.” - The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade, on journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed by shelling in Syria Wednesday.

[Photo: Marie Colvin in the A&E documentary “Bearing Witness,” on women in war zones. Credit: A&E Indie Films via NY Times]