• Subway Shrugging

    When I got onto the subway, I took a seat across from a couple. He looked like he had eaten two of her, and his indigestion was causing him to regret his lunch. She kept her head turned away from his, so it appeared as an unwanted growth rather than a wife resting on a husband’s shoulder.…

  • Despair Has Its Own Calms

    Nothing cracks me up like watching  a Dracula movie and seeing the Count pop up completely vertical in his coffin. Maybe they filmed it in reverse. It’s like a time lapse of a flower blooming. Hilarious. But I can remember being afraid of Dracula. I was about 4 or 5, and I feared his arrival…

  • Sincerity – if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

    “I can’t get that dog out of my nose.” My mother was making short sniffs of air in and out. The sound was grating on me. We had just left a birthday party full of interesting people and one small, well-intentioned dog. I knew that was the dog she was referring to, but I asked…

  • A Ride for Connie

    “Hey! What are you doing?” His voice was cool. She knew it would be. “I was just looking,” said Connie. The man hardly startled her even though she didn’t see him come up from behind. She had been sitting on the side of a building that housed the saloon where her mother worked, next to a door…

  • Pigeon Q & A: Bird hair

    I just got about 8 pounds of hair cut off and then I went out of town for a few days, so no one around here really saw me until Tuesday. Here’s an excerpt from a conversation I had Tuesday afternoon on the way home from the subway. Pigeon: Haven’t seen you in a few…

  • Golden Retriev-him

    I followed this thin leggy girl up the stairs from the subway. Her legs were much longer than mine so she walked a lot faster, and after a block she was a good 30 paces ahead. I cursed her and her long legs and me and my short legs and thought about how much further…

  • Fun with a corpus

    She looked down at the sleeping baby. He looked so peaceful now in his stroller, smashed in among the other pigeons taking their daily cramped commute into the city. He had spent the entire night awake and crying. Normally, he was not a fussy baby, which is why she wanted to go check on him.…