The Pastor and Marguerite
Melissa Mesku
My heart is open. I can feel it. It’s never open. This can’t be a coincidence. This—
My heart is open. I can feel it. It’s never open. This can’t be a coincidence. This—
My father’s disjointed rage has shocked him—I’ve seen that look before. He no longer draws from his beer even as Dad tilts his own way up.
I am no longer youthful, but not quite middle aged either. Traces of a younger me are present, though fading.
Of course, Jesus only had hyssop—a bitter wine on a wet sponge—during the passion, but that was not an option at the concession stand.
When so much energy is spent on surveying the territory, adapting to the wonders and confusions of a new place, there isn’t always room to develop as a person.
Even when I had my brief zoology phase, in elementary school, I always preferred mammals.
I will take an infestation, but only if it won’t spread.
Now, you book an appointment on a whim. But it’s not a whim. You’ve been thinking about this for a while.
Like the other day, when we got into a fight about who was the luckier between the two of us to have found the other.
For Caite’s Sweet 16 we get a couple rooms at the Motel 6 on Cerrillos, not the one downtown with the outdoor pool, the one on the southside between the strip club and the mall, and everyone can pay
On the contrary: I wanted people to see my spectacle. I wanted them to never forget it. Z had wondered: what if the joy of experiment dies with joy itself? If the relationship ends, what if we’re done with it forever?
When I was 22, my mother was excited for the first day at my new job, but not so much that she couldn’t wait to tell me about the demon that had attacked her in the night.
Priorities.
They held
Sometimes I stop talking to my boyfriend for no reason.
I didn’t know how long it’d been since he’d last eaten. I also knew he needed water.
The last night of the trip, you stay with one of his friends in Vallecitos, New Mexico.
Soon sunlight would be replaced by nighttime. I felt this, the same way my grandma could feel the rain coming on.
I don't notice anything when the television is on. A bomb could go off in my kitchen and I wouldn't notice the wreckage until the next commercial break.
We know who has her period and who is still waiting. If a girl takes her backpack to the bathroom or sits pool-side in swim class, she has her period. So do the girls who—when they ask Can I go to the bathroom? and the teacher says, No—say But I really need to go.
What I do know: Janet Wellington made eye contact with me in the YMCA pool. I also never had a chance to look my mother in the eye and say goodbye.
On a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon when I didn’t want to walk outside: a box proclaiming to be synthetic urine for sale in Nirvana, next to Louie’s Tux Shop and across from C.J. Banks in the Muncie Mall, behind the counter where they sell glass pipes blown to resemble tiny carrots and octopi, next to a rack of Rasta wigs.
I turn 30 next month but I’m no longer afraid because I read somewhere that time is an illusion. I am purchasing an anti-aging moisturizer, just in case. It’s expensive, but money is no object. I’m worth four figures.
I’ve been tasked with digitizing my father’s slides, a hundred or so he inherited from his aunt.
And yet, when it came to hitting a baseball, I always liked my odds.
Is this new relationship self-sabotage in disguise, or is it the cure?
Garielle's longest, most peculiar, most particularized book. A sure-to-be collector's item. Not be be missed!