From the Chair

“This will hurt some, but it would hurt a lot more if I give you a shot in your gums,” the nice bald Russian man said. I nodded. I’d had someone push and trim along my gum line with a hideous instrument before, it had gone fine. Nerve pain in a tooth is the worst, […]

We May Sink and Settle

Someone told me even numbers of bamboo stalks are unlucky, so I bought another pot with three stalks, bringing my total to 9. I had 3, that was good, then 6, disaster, now back to 9. “What does that have to do with?”my coworker asked. I was carrying my bamboo. “I don’t know,” I said. […]

Get and Take

The woman was pleased that I was buying an umbrella. I had just splashed through Rockefeller Center, in three inches of rain, this made me laugh. Nothing was making me laugh at all, only actually wading in my sandals, running between the buildings there. “Once we sold almost every umbrella we had, to this whole […]

Unisphere, Perisphere

I didn’t go to Queens to see the Unisphere. As I approached it, it opened and arched and bent different ways, and I stepped up and over the edge of what would hold in water, if it was summer, and walked under it, and there was a kite caught in one edge, near the Americas, and […]