“She took a hammer and smashed my game. Hard, all to bits. It was a punishment.” He sat in the backseat, strapped in, his face to the window. Then his eyes met mine through the rearview mirror. He saw something, a flinch, a startle, maybe. “I deserved it,” he said.  “Really I did.”

Another day, they were laughing. They could have been brothers, the two cutups. We drove past a stand of trees and then it was quiet in the car. “Have you been to that graveyard?” Asking me, this time. I had no idea a cemetery was in that neighorhood, hidden somewhere amid well-tended yards and fine, old houses.

“There’s a little boy’s grave. I go when I’m riding my bike. He died a long time ago, but somebody leaves teddy bears. And cookies and things. On the boy’s birthday? There are always cookies. I don’t touch them.” I asked why he went there. “I like to,” he said. “And it just makes me really sad.” I held my eyes steady, steely straight ahead. I kept clearing my throat. Finally I said all I could say, “It makes me sad too. It’s nice of you to think about him. You know, you are such a good kid.”

We haven’t laid eyes on him in years. But I still can see him, sitting at the grave of a long gone boy. The living keeping  company with the dead.

Miss Nell would start her cooking shows with, “Now as everyone knows I hate to cook so let’s get started and get out of this kitchen.”

When I was a little kid and we lived in South Haven, Michigan for a while, the house my family rented had one of those old electric ranges with the built-in deep fat fryer. Please remember this was back before unhealthy fried food was invented.

My mom would buy pre-made doughnut dough, the kind in a tube (like biscuits or crescent rolls). She’d pop ‘em open and separate the flat die-cut doughnut parts and fry them. The doughnut holes, fresh out and almost too hot to eat, were golden heaven. We’d sprinkle powdered sugar on them sometimes. Is there anything better than fresh, homemade doughnuts? No.

I don’t remember what we did with the doughnut parts outside the cut circles. Maybe we cooked and ate those too, never speaking about it or looking at each other.

I thought this was really sad at first, but in thinking it through, it also makes sense. In a country that no longer makes things, I suppose one of our last commodities that can be bought and sold is our attention.

All our accents derive from Britain.

Carole Corlew.

Related to stuff we’re talking about.

My brother was four years older but still I fought with him, physically, like an idiot. I took quite a bit of punishment before I learned to fight dirty and run, climb a tree where he couldn’t follow, barricade myself somewhere. Sometimes I had to wait for a while but I didn’t care. He knew I would die of thirst, starve to death, if I had to. So he would give up and go away.

I came across my grandfather perusing your blog site instead of taking out the waste