A Letdown Squid

A Letdown Squid 4

I left my heart in San Francisco: Amazing Writing about the City I Love the Most

San Francisco dreams at twilight. Jumping over bridges to fly across the sea. Riding bikes down long and winding lanes, at once straight and three dimensionally beautiful simultaneously. Dreams in color - or in black and white, in a city bathed in oranges, reds, purples, whichever color(s) you might imagine. It is a city of desire, of adultery. It cheats its own form, mimics itself and draws you in through mere thought. The city does not beg adoration of you - it creates it before you arrive. And when the sun casts that glow across the dark streets, when the hills cast shadows upon each other, when you cast yourself into the beauty of such a place - then you can understand violent lust. Not only do you thirst for human interaction (in whatever way you might understand that), but you crave the city itself as if you do not simply partake. In this way, you become a part of the view. But only at twilight will these dreams take form.

26 April 2012 · Comments

A Letdown Squid 19

Mother by Grace Paley

One day I was listening to the AM radio. I heard a song: “Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway.” By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway. As a matter of fact, she did stand frequently in various doorways looking at me. She stood one day, just so, at the front door, the darkness of the hallway behind her. It was New Year’s Day. She said sadly, If you come home at 4 a.m. when you’re seventeen, what time will you come home when you’re twenty? She asked this question without humor or meanness. She had begun her worried preparations for death. She would not be present, she thought, when I was twenty. So she wondered.

Another time she stood in the doorway of my room. I had just issued a political manifesto attacking the family’s position on the Soviet Union. She said, Go to sleep for godsakes, you damn fool, you and your Communist ideas. We saw them already, Papa and me, in 1905. We guessed it all.

At the door of the kitchen she said, You never finish your lunch. You run around senselessly. What will become of you?

Then she died.

Naturally for the rest of my life I longed to see her, not only in doorways, in a great number of places—in the dining room with my aunts, at the window looking up and down the block, in the country garden among zinnias and marigolds, in the living room with my father.

They sat in comfortable leather chairs. They were listening to Mozart. They looked at one another amazed. It seemed to them that they’d just come over on the boat. They’d just learned the first English words. It seemed to them that he had just proudly handed in a 100 percent correct exam to the American anatomy professor. It seemed as though shed just quit the shop for the kitchen.

I wish I could see her in the doorway of the living room.

She stood there a minute. Then she sat beside him. They owned an expensive record player. They were listening to Bach. She said to him, Talk to me a little. We don’t talk so much anymore.

I’m tired, he said. Can’t you see? I saw maybe thirty people today. All sick, all talk talk talk talk. Listen to the music, he said. I believe you once had perfect pitch. I’m tired, he said.

Then she died.

7 January 2012 · Comments

A Letdown Squid 11

Oh look! A blog! Sweet!: Hood Rich

verandahmaureen:

And I know EBT is for Expensive Black Tastes…

A household’s monthly waste is that of a small Guatemalan town’s agricultural worth.

But Toya’s been rocking her adult IQ since birth,

because her mom couldn’t be caught dead on Earth having not supplied.

But yet,

she’s still alive,

though Toya…

22 September 2011 · Comments

Runner-up: Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize 16

Runner-up: Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize

My story “The Ghosts of Takahiro Okyo” has been selected as a runner-up in the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize.

Here’s what Gish Jen, this year’s judge, says about it:

“I found The Ghosts of Takahiro Okyo convincing, gripping, atmospheric, and shattering — a truly creepy, original, ambitious story that moves with great agility and touches on something profound.”

So yeah, stoked doesn’t even begin to explain it. To be picked out of hundreds of submissions, to receive praise from someone who has been published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic and a B.A.S.S. anthology, is just unreal! Jen’s a freaking Guggenheim recipient! It feels good to be validated, to know there are people out there that like what you are do.

16 September 2011 · Comments

“Sure Things Falling” 8

“Sure Things Falling”

Here is the short story I read tonight at Coker College’s 9/11 commemoration event.

Erica Zuckerman catches the train into Manhattan, gets off at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and cuts through the park, heading west. She is on her way to see Andrew. She asked him to meet her at Taj Tribeca on Murray, probably the most ambitious Punjabi restaurant in the Financial District. Though Erica and Andrew are fans of the atmosphere and well-stocked buffet, Taj Tribeca holds a greater significance. Major moments of their life together seem to revolve around its golden linens and paper dining mats. It is where they met, him on a drunk takeout run for his fellow associates at Harris Beach, her on a blind date with a Junior Vice President from Fiduciary Trust whose dinner conversation included the words portfolio, big account and mutual funds. Andrew stepped up to their booth with his hands behind his back, tapping the floor with the tips of his shoe, pretending to be shy like a little boy. He excused himself, slid his card across the table to Erica, and told her to phone him if things didn’t work out. Appalled by his arrogance, it was weeks before she called but when she did she never regretted it. Andrew reminded her that being unmarried at thirty-one didn’t mean she was a failure; she was waiting to be rescued from the prospects of settling. When he proposed to her in that same booth four years later over a chicken chettinad she knew she had been saved. And now she is on her way to tell Andrew that after months of trying, after their first pregnancy had ended in a still-birth, they are getting a second chance at being parents, news that Erica feels is worthy of Taj Tribeca’s minty cornish hen hariyali.

She was propelled out of the apartment by the promise of the little pink positive sign and now she is too early. She decides to stop in the public library and browse the stacks. As Erica runs her fingers along the spines of books she will never have the time to read, she imagines a new life, the life inside of her, a little girl as precocious as Andrew or a little boy as practical as herself.

There is a boomcrunchpop comparable to thunder, a sound like doom. The city takes a pause. There is something sinister in the milliseconds of silence that come next. She can feel the floor shaking as people run to the windows. Her heart skips a beat, or two, or three. It sinks in her chest and rests on her stomach. She is caught in the wave of people rushing down the stairs and out on to the street. Back outside her eyes have to readjust to the sunlight. The day is bright, clear except for a single thick cloud ripping through the sky like some airborne toxic event. Everyone is craning their neck to stare up at the dark cumulus creeping towards City Hall. There are screams coming from windows above her. The air is beginning to taste like gasoline. It isn’t a cloud it is a column of smoke.

The buildings are hemorrhaging; people are pouring out of their offices and apartments to trail the smoke back to its source. Erica follows the crowds west past Taj Tribeca, her spirit chained to the collective. Some instinctual switch has been flipped and suddenly she subscribes to safety in numbers. When she gets to the corner of Murray and Church it is too terrible, smoke is bellowing out of the World Trade towers like a cigarette. She can see tiny dots raining from the building and it takes her brain a moment to recognize them as people, jumping head first to escape the flames, their bodies bursting on cars and atriums, crushing others trying to evacuate the plaza. It is too terrible. She closes her eyes and counts back from five, like Andrew taught her whenever she was afraid or angry. FIVE. She feels the energy under her feet, the concrete is electric. The smell of burning metal is wafting down from the tower and it hugs everything. FOUR. THREE. Somewhere a hundred taxis are blowing their horns all at once; men in expensive suits are choking on sobs. TWO. In Hebrew there are many words for faith, aman, batah, mibtah. Erica has always prided herself on her beliefs, for keeping the faith, not just when it is easy. ONE. And when she opens her eyes just in time to catch Flight 175 diving towards Andrew’s office all she can think to do is pray.

11 September 2011 · Comments