Written by Michael Lagace
“I’m going down Bourbon Street again,” she says
Her beautiful eyes radiate with no regret
She stops awhile, sober in the cold night air
She hides inside a darkness only she will wear
I say, “Now girl, don’t you get ahead of me
Lately I am not the king that I can be.”
Reign begins unthroned, she stares back at me
A step or two then three just out of my reach
Continued…
This is a quick and easy breakfast that I like to make every once in a while. The batter is consistently good, so the extra boost of greatness comes from using a good bread. It takes me about 30 minutes to have 4 or 5 slices cooked. Good morning!
- batter -
1 banana
1/3 cup soy milk
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract (not artificial!)
margarine
sliced bread
Blend the bananas, soy milk, cinnamon, and vanilla in a blender until it is smooth. Pour the mixture onto a plate. Dip the slices of bread into the mix, coating each side. Fry in margarine in a medium-hot skillet until each side is golden brown, flipping once. Serve with maple syrup or a nice fresh berry sauce.
A few days ago I posted a short story called The Ledge. It was written during a particular time when I was most frustrated with my life. For most of a day, it stayed up as it was, but at lunch today I saw it needed changes. What is now posted follows a soy chai latte-induced editing flurry, likely influenced by The Road.
I think it’s interesting how we all go through some pretty bleak times. It could almost be the most bonding trait among us. It’s like we’re digging ourselves a rut we can’t get out of. But all of us can, and nearly all of us do. We take the dirt and build a mountain, and at the top it’s enormous.
When I wrote that story, I’d been digging furiously. My job made me miserable, I wasn’t doing nearly enough writing to satisfy me, and I was falling into such habits that were ruining me. And that story came naturally at the time. I wrote it in one big spurt. Soon after that I started climbing my mountain.
And now I’m nearly at the top.
Yesterday morning I missed the bus. Maybe a minute late. Caught another to Granville, then waited for the next bus on the route I wanted. While waiting, a woman came out of McDonald’s with another man, thanked him, and mingled among us. She then asked all of us for change. Well, everyone except me. Guess it’s time to do laundry.
When it came, she got on the bus and sat in the back. She asked the man across from her for change. She said she was getting a place to live today, she was going to shower and get her act together. She’d been clean for 24 hours.
He reached into his pocket and gave her all the loose coins he had. A sour look, and she said, “Is this all?”
A man dressed in traditional African clothing got on the bus. The woman leapt to her feet and saluted him! “My brother,” she shouted. “My brother! Black power, my brother!”
He looked her up and down. He scowled. He blurted, “Get out of here!”
And she did, at the very next stop, after asking him for change.
An hour before we were to entertain our guests, she told me she was ill. The symptoms were showing up all day, really; very little sleep, stubbornness, general crankiness. She said it would pass by dinner, so I began to prepare it. I checked in on her when I could, but by myself the cooking was not going well. With so many dishes to make, I ended up being late for an undercooked dinner, and when I told her it was ready, she said she was much too ill to eat.
There was no such illness. If a nurse had examined her, there would be no fever. No infection, no upset stomach, nothing. The illness was a relationship that she couldn’t get used to. She was so accustomed to being alone that trusting anyone left her uneasy. The feeling of falling, the feeling of one day being hurt; these were her fears, and by what they were, she suffered them only because she wanted something that she didn’t know she didn’t want at all.
I lived as a teenage boy over-protected from anything of questionable morality. My mother at times would remove posters from my room if she thought there was too much skin showing, so I had to be clever. When we first got our computer — long before we’d ever gotten Internet access — I had a program called Rainbow Paint, a predecessor to MS Paint. Using its limited tools, I drew a picture of the Black Cat from an issue of Amazing Spider-Man that I had. It was great work, I remember, but her costume showed much more skin than my mother would ever allow. But rather than cover it up, I chopped it up. In big blocks of pixels, I moved it around like a puzzle, scrambling it. Any time I wanted to look at it afterward, it would take a few minutes to move it back to how it was. This is among the lengths I went to as a child to conceal my curiousity.
Not sure why I never just kept it on a floppy disk.
Here and there are where we kissed
This fleeting feeling, now barely missed
Bare, we twist, insist in sin
Persist in pursuing this place within
I mistake my patience and desire fades
Awaiting a way to wade through waves
You drown yourself in tides of time
Entwined in wine and finding mind
A stranger waits to show intent
A stranger way to grow intense
Your pale eclipse of embrace through mist
My graceful waste of greatful lips
Who knows what I was thinking on that roof, drunk, obviously out of my usual self. It was remarkably easy to get up there. People walked by on the streets, but it was so dark and I crept catlike past the windows. Every room was empty, some had lights on, and I was so tempted to peek. I didn’t resist.
After I jumped back down, we hurried through the alley and onto a side street. We came to a place without lights, maybe a park or a field, somewhere we couldn’t see. All we could hear was the humming of my jacket. We were lost.
We walked towards the nearest light that wasn’t the way we had come. There was no trail that we could see but we walked through the bush anyway. Eventually we made it to our room, and eventually I made it to sleep; but in the morning we still didn’t know what had happened. And still today I wonder how I could have been so completely not myself that night.
John’s son didn’t sleep well Wednesday night, and neither did he. He stood by the crib for hours watching his son cry. John didn’t know if it was from hunger, or fear, or pain. The noises were all the same.
At work, too, the noises were the same, just louder. Sometimes the prod wouldn’t discharge completely and the calf would cry. He’d prod it again, and sometimes again, until it stopped. The other calfs would cry too, the ones waiting to see him. Were they hungry, maybe? Or scared? It was just noise. And when he prodded it enough, the noise always stopped.
John used the prod on himself once. A small one he brought home, just big enough to stop a calf’s crying. He did it in the garage. It hurt, even on the lowest setting, but he didn’t make a noise. He didn’t sleep well that night.
It was the noise that kept John awake. He heard it all day, he heard it all night. It was all the same.
All he wanted was for it to stop crying.
