Swim 4

As it got later in the day, he rolled up his towel and left the beach. A fine warm shower. He enjoyed how hot and how clean the water felt after the sea. And when he closed his eyes, he could still feel the current rocking him. He breathed in the clean laundry smell of his folded shirt and enjoyed the crisp coolness of it in his hands for a few seconds before putting it on. The white linen looked stood out brightly against the tan of his skin, and in the mirror he was pleased with his reflection, the warm brown of his arms, the hairline barely receding, the fine wrinkles around his eyes.

He left the hotel room again to walk along the Marginal Way and to get dinner. It had been his routine all week. The waiter nodded at him in recognition and brought him a basket of fried clams. Not greasy enough to saturate the paper sheet underneath. His beer was cold, and he could drink without thinking too much. At the table next to him a middle age couple were talking loudly about something. Their adult son who had just gotten divorced, it sounded like. The woman spoke with animated gestures, threw her arms up in sharp, birdlike motions that set her bangles jangling. The man seemed to chew deliberately, and Jack thought about how he looked eating food. As he chewed on a fried clam, he wondered if he looked as slow and deliberate and ruminative.

gallery of characters

--he doesn’t like rain, nor does he like umbrellas—he says they break fifteen seconds after he touches them—and he is shy, has a good sense of dry wit, and can never scream.
--she scratches the skin above her ear, makes faces at sparrows and children, deplores all forty-nine years she’s been on this planet while defending every decision she’s made, and enjoys tea in the morning
--she is physically ideal at 63, can lift packages better than any 21 year old, has strong muscles, likes clean humor, never curses, believes in traditional marriage, and adopted two children since she is barren. She once fought a man who was mugging her at night, and won.
--he rides the train studying Chinese, trades on his computer during the day, never leaves the house on Saturday after converting to Judaism, is over protective of his mother and had only one girlfriend, but broke up with her for he “bad habits” and “bad attitude” toward her own family.
--he is a man with a slouching belly, recognizes a fine cigar, plays chess with one of the masters at Harvard Square as a weekly ritual, has had many lovers and hates himself for failing them again and again, owns a chain of Starbucks, likes to play the lovable uncle angle.
--she had long black hair, black-rimmed glasses, a sloping chest, and talked incessantly of her coworkers not doing their job—her voice jumped from tenor through soprano, and reminded her roommate of a stuttering radiator.

Swim 3

Now, more than 20 years later, the sand still feels good. The firmness of it. He would swim with Sarah. She would test it with her toes first. He was always surprised – suddenly tender – at the sight of her toes, pink and vulnerable. The nails of them looked like little shells, the wet lacquer of them. And she would walk on the balls of her feet. Her walking was always catlike, tentative. And he wanted to scoop her up and carry her into the surf. And not drop her in, but just hold her. She could swim well, better than Jack. She had been a lifeguard and was part of the swim team in college. He envied her ease in the water. She belonged there in a way he did not. He imagined that she was never frightened. Not of the murkiness when the waves stirred the sand at the bottom, or the dark shadow of a fish, or the ropy seaweed that could slap against your leg and surprise you.

Without Sarah, his swims were perfunctory. He remembered his father’s briskness. A breaststroke through the unhelpful waves. A few arbitrary turns and back-and-forths. And then back out on the beach to dry in the sun. Strange to be at the beach alone. He had always associated it with family, sitting with his mother and father under the northern sun. Or with Sarah, sitting on a blanket and digging her big toe into the sand. She always seemed at home there, her bare legs shiny with sunscreen and the freckles coming out on her cheeks.

the Garbage man

Hank spends more time with trash on his mind than you probably do all month. Which is why he admired the purple sky with cod-shaped clouds that Tuesday morning, along with the stench of lawn between the flouring mounds of garbage. Taking time out for the beautiful things. Staying observant, keeping out of the oblivious haze his partners were lost in. Their minds in the gutter while they pick up the toppled rubbish. Hank made himself out to be different and earned some scorn from them therefore. He didn’t learn his coworker’s names and didn’t think networking would earn him anything. From this he was probably the happiest garbage man in the Dorchester region.
At one house his driver stopped the truck and walked out for a smoke. Just before that Hank had noticed them driving by a woman of small stature walking briskly in her business outfit towards the subway. She seemed hyper vigilant, turning around to watch them pass. Now walking around the sidewalk, Hank looked above the span of roofs, the overcast sky pervading the scent of rain, when he looked down and saw movement from a basement window. He stepped closer and could make out the shape of a torso. That, and the bars of a cage. Hank crept up closer to the wall, and peering inside discovered a naked man doing push ups inside a very large and closed cage.
The man’s ass was firm as a grape bowl, as the shape of his tight balls was the peach misplaced there with the other reddish globes. But really it was the shining behind of a woman’s, and when he turned I watched his glistening stomach before the patch of a shade between the legs that made his gender official, for even his pecks could be the size of some flat-chested female. This was a man setting himself in bound perfection.

Tale of Occipital and Parietal Bones

Today she sulks. Yesterday she smirked. And last week she dove into hades' great cold depths of ignominium. The variety of variance is veritabley perturbing. Lemons eating flowers. Baibies eating Pluto and Catullus spouting lullabies in the vernacular.What has this world come to? "To what do you wish it to come?" a very fat English caterpillar responds as he idly and very hautily slides off the bulbous form of the fruiting body of the nearest fungus. To what can we draw the attention of our peers? An armored Cinderella dashes into the clearing and shakes her Victorian ruffles about and delicate coronation of oyster seed, inkerer's wheels, her lace garters and subluminous veil and intransent frenzy of carotid artieris as subliminal, intricate and mystifying as the fabric of time and space itself, a lace doily to time's past when upwards right and downwards vertical were perfectly normal experiences of chronology, or rather, chrono-chaoso-colloseoum, when every direction of time was as prodigiuos and predictable as air molecules over an open flame.

Elemental intransient insouciance was her favorite experiment in which to partake on Saturday mornings when all the world was filled with light and GABA-receptor-filled table spoons and radish-leaf dressed dolls in the position of a chalice accompanied by preternaturally-spotted catatonic ladybugs reigning in spring, cords of them lassoing fresh rotten racoon dung, random flowers, and cottonhead tree fibers through rotting window-sills and oxidized metal-flavored screens.

Darwin's beetle

The species with the nickname “Darwin’s Beetle” has an enormous set of jaws, like a pair of prongs, barely held up by this sex legged armored insect. Vladimir would framed twelve dead examples and share them with his closest friends. Once he brought you up to the sixth floor space in his Boston apartment, he bent under the bed and rolled out the collection. He held the case in his hand, the glass reflecting in the arthropod’s blackened slippery shell the visitor’s face. A woman once reacted with delight as if entering an entomology fair. Vladimir explained this was his only animal he needed to study and would scoff at any other bug passing his doorway. She smiled, her lips cracked in the middle but otherwise an attractive red, before sleeping with him on the king size bed (everything was large in this living space, which made it cramped and maze-like). The next morning she was gone. So were five cases of Darwin’s beetle, all male. He punched the walls, bit his arm, cut further into his other arm with broken nails, before taking a daytime nap. From his closet he’d horded more than thirty other beetles. He’d given each a name, an age, and knew who was friends and who would never step on the same branch.

He had a face and smile like a clown without makeup. The whites of his teeth against the clay gums, a Mr. Rogers’ mein, cordial, and spirited. And yet confused almost. A large forehead, the declining chin and thick veiny neck. Long lean and bony arms, he was spotted in school often in an undershirt and shorts. Callused fingernails from the soil he’d dig through. Finely haired calves, handsome legs that his dead wife loved to stroke. Peppered black hair and ape ears and gentle nose. Blue eyes. Nose hairs. Irregular nails. A nervous chortle, and low tolerance to beer and wine. A high school biology teacher. An advocate against climate change, and a critic of natural design. A catholic all his life.

Swim 2

He thought about a jellyfish wrapping its tentacles around a leg – the panic, the screaming and kicking. When he was a child, he dreaded the water and the thought of the stinging salt in his nose and coughing up brine. Mostly, he was afraid of stepping on something sharp in the sandy murk: an urchin, a bit of shell that would cut his foot. He would come to the beach each year with his family and would grow bored and hot on the sand. He would find grains of it in his hair days afterwards, or in his clothes.

But in the water was cold and fear. The slippery feel of something on his leg – not a jellyfish, but a long strand of seaweed. Enough to cause minor panic, anyway. Enough for him to flail and kick his legs out. When the undertow sucked at him slightly and the salt filled his mouth, he knew it was time to come out, give up, and sit on the blanket with his mother. As far as he could tell, she never went in the water. She sat on her blanket, calm and placid, in a bathing suit that looked like black rubber. Her father would walk briskly up and down the beach with the air of an army officer. Jack didn’t walk with him; he couldn’t keep up. But when the sitting grew old and the swimming too frightening and exhausting, he would walk by himself. The hard ribs of sand under his feet felt good.