Ordinary Life

I'd been in the shower for three days, and still I wasn't clean. I looked through the fogged shower glass  to the alarm clock beside my bed. Okay, twenty-seven minutes to be exact. Still, twenty-seven minutes alone in my head can be an eternity... and I had yet to do anything but stand under the spray of hot water. I decided then to speed things up by taking a man's shower.  That is to say, I'd skip the loofah and hair conditioner and use the woodsy-smelling green bottle of 3-N-1, instead of the three lilac scented pastel bottles meant to be used successively.  The combination was meant to unlock a woman's secret beauty according to the happy spokeswoman on their paid advertising blocks during television's insomnia shift. Ha! (had that been aloud?) With no secrets and no beauty to unlock, I should be able to knock this shower out with a one-two punch: hair, body, out!  I had things to do, important, pressing things and I needed to finish them right a...

my hands fall clumsily onto the keyboard i am amazed there are no misspellings waiting for my coffee to cool a sip more and the floating pat of butter to melt i am waiting on  a paradox a pair of dice i type and sit sip and type i am waiting on words to come out paradeux monkeys with typewriters we've done this experiment before the pilot in the breakfast nook asks for boiled eggs the man in the burger shirt would like to check out late.  he's been places we all can see from his shirt with the Burgers that are  first In then Out we don't have those down here and we don't have hard-boiled eggs either not this morning. they were ordered from the warehouse but never came she tells him she is sixty five perhaps and only another half hour from bed she greets we stragglers who have slept soundly under her night desk watch. i wonder who it is that isn't there to greet her at the door, the same nobody she works night shifts  in this ai...

His parents were away for the weekend. We had the beach house to ourselves. They'd invited us down, insisted we house-sit as an anniversary gift.  Celebrating our first married year and now, our news last week, that baby made three. A smidge of extra icing for That old and preferable, still more socially acceptable order; First the love, then the marriage, fallen tree, baby's carriage. This time.  We would leave our footprints in the sand, take a photo on the pier. The three days of their absence, we would celebrate as one. We would watch the sea's shenanigans and flirtations of the sun from just across the street. There'd be lots of staying in. The plan was simple: steak dinner (with baked potatoes, because that's fancy when you've been married one whole year.) He cooked the steaks, I set the table. We lit the candles on the table, of course. Moonlit stroll, we happened across a grand celebration: the lighthouse on this tiny island was being re-lit. It had...