Ravens
Robert made them chicken Milanese, fried chicken, and vol-au-vents
Their frumpy, unmarriageable daughter got fatter and fatter
Once the young left the nest, the parents could go back to having sky-sex
Apart from Robert, to whom I am apparently married, my only companions on the New Mexican mesa — at 6,500 feet of altitude, forty minutes from town — have been two horses and a pair of ravens. It is already remote, but I also cannot drive. Even if I could drive, vehicles are vengeful and all but guaranteed to break down as soon as they reach the mountain, or are otherwise liable to try to kill themselves, and me, by jumping off the vertical cliff where all cell service stops. It is here that the ravens’ crèche is located, where fifty or sixty youths gather every fall, having left their parents’ nest to find a mate, improve their flying skills, and do all the other stuff they hadn’t paid enough attention to when they still were living at home.
They are a raucous bunch, terrorizing whoever passes by this part of the mountain around this time of the year, chasing cars and harassing the bicyclists — …
Keep Your Lavender Out of My Liquor
Mixed Drinks are a Great American Invention.
Only three are fit for consumption.
The martini, named after the Gold Rush drinking town of Martinez, California, is one of them.
The schoolteachers and lawyers and computer programmers and real-estate agents sitting in their suburban living rooms and splitting a THC gummy to catch a little buzz on a Wednesday night don’t realize, poor and deadened souls, that they’re heirs to a great American tradition. They don’t know that, once upon a time not too long ago, men and women like them went not home to Netflix and Chill but to bars, where they could order one of six or eight or ten old-fashioned drinks, which they could sip with conviction, feeling their horizons grow wider. They don’t understand that a good libation is supposed to send you out into the world — to mountains rich with silver, or to the next stall over where some gorgeous girl awaits you and the adventures you’ll have together. Instead, these poor shadows of men and women, sunken and self-medicated, retreat from the expansive appreciation of life’s possibilities, …
Retail
Roy suggested a trip to Florida — “My treat!” — in hopes of breaking the impasse: he was getting nowhere with her; but a hotel in Florida? Tell me how that wouldn’t work. Dale said she wanted a change, to take advantage of the quiet winter days to relax and catch up on her reading. Roy said, “Read what?” He’d never seen her read anything she hadn’t nabbed in the checkout line. “In Florida people don’t kill time by reading.” Roy was a middle-aged man who wore a tie but yanked on it irritably throughout the day. “They sunbathe on white-sand beaches.” He had suspiciously lustrous black hair and moderate height, only a third of which was legs. “You want a sun-kissed orange? Pull one from the tree.” He preferred to breathe through his mouth. One eyelid sagged, and his teeth were crowded. His days were divided between selling insurance and nondirectional, intense longing, much of which was erotic. Roy had the …
