There was a pool table in the room at the top of the stairs that had been the family room for the people in the house, but since they rented to Mary, no one, the children or their friends, were allowed up there.

“Charles,” she said. “Get out of here.”

But I leaned against the doorjamb and smiled at her.

Two boys were playing in the yard, one about a year older than the other, I thought, but they looked so much alike they could have been twins.

“Fix it yourself.”

“Uh uh. Mom said you fix it.”

“Mom doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

“I’m telling.”

“Tell.”

She took a dress from its hanger, slipped into a pair of canvas shoes, pulled the dress over her head and shook till it was on. On the dresser was a picture of us. She looking the other way. Me holding her hand and smiling. A parrot was caught flapping on her shoulder.

Outside, the boys stared at her. When we got to the car, the older one punched the younger one and they tumbled on the ground, wrestling, until their mother stepped onto the porch and yelled for them to stop.

Cattle were out from the barns, standing still except for their tails against their backs, and the smell of shit was sucked in by the car speeding past. When we climbed hills, at the top, there was always that feeling of near weightlessness, then I settled back in my seat and counted my toes.

“Pull off here,” I said, pointing.

“I know,” she said, and followed the access road to another road that cut beneath the highway. She kept at it, down that road, to a dirt road with a combination-locked barbed-wire gate.

“Three to the left, fourteen to…”

“I know,” she said, and I closed my eyes and waited for the car to start rolling again.

When I opened up, dust was all around the car, and trees flew past, gravel popping hard against the doors, everything in a blur except the sky in a thin line above the trees. An old house lay collapsed on its foundation out in the field and, beyond it, the runway stretched to the horizon.

Small yellow flowers grew in cracks I could see even from the car. Mary pulled to the ditch, cutting the wheels away from it, and we jumped the fence and walked toward the runway.

All afternoon we drank with the sun hazy in the sky. The planes skidded, their wheels catching against the asphalt, and then there would be silence and I could feel my pulse. When the bottle was empty, and lay finished on the grass, she said, “Get the car.”

“What?” I said.

We laughed, hiccuped into our hands.

“The car,” she said. “Bring it.”

I pointed. “The fence,” I said. “The ditch.”

“Bring it.”

So, I stood, and, stumbling, made my way through the field, the light golden off the grass, and took the keys out of my pocket. The car slipped back before I could get it into gear, then lurched forward, bouncing hard against the ditch, the barbed-wire cutting against the metal, then pushed through.

She stood, arms waving, pulling them toward her.

“Easy does it,” she said, then opened the door and pushed me to the side and we bounced over the field slowly toward the house.

On the way home, the town was a few lights scattered across the plain and the wind whipped my hair into my eyes, but she pulled hers back, and wrapped a rubber band around, and drove with her face clear.

“You need a haircut,” she said.

I mumbled into the sound of the engine and she let it go at that until we pulled into the driveway.

“I’ve got scissors,” she said.

We climbed the stairs, still staggering, then she took a chair from her room and dragged it across the floor, her dress falling across her shoulder, leaving that breast exposed.

“It looks like an eye,” I said.

“Kiss it,” she said, and I bent from the pool table, the wine still dry in my mouth, and did.

Her bathroom was dark — there was no light in the fixture — and the light from the stars was so dim I could see my hands but hardly my feet. I ran water in the sink. I pressed what was left of my hair against my scalp, and stared, eyes closer than ours had been in the house, and blinked. There were places on the skull I could see skin. Nicks and cuts. One side higher than the other.

Her dress was in a pile in the middle of the floor. She had the lamp and light both on, and the screens were rolled tightly at the tops of the windows, so we couldn’t see out, but anyone outside could have seen in.

“The boys,” I said.

“It’s all right,” she said, and pulled me toward her.

When I woke, the lights were off and the moon had risen. At the windows I saw the shadows of two figures crouched low and kneeling.

“That’s not her,” said one boy’s voice.

“That’s him,” said the other, and they jumped from the roof and landed on the grass.

All night I lay, eyes closed, hands folded against my stomach. Near dawn I heard the sound of the diesels gearing down for the climb over the hill and cardinals swept past the windows then, as the sun rose, I wrapped myself in her sheet and stood thinking about the day before.

In the bathroom I drank long gulps, the water running down my chin and spotting the sheet. With the window closed there was a silence the room didn’t have and I closed my eyes and cursed my bald head, but when I opened the door she sat on the edge of the mattress, some of my hair in her hands, and said, “I found this.”

I saw his mother getting out of her car. She kept fretting with her clothes. The baby was strapped to its seat, tightly. He kind of laughed then burped as I slid my hands beneath him. He laughed once, then lay quietly. I held him tightly against me.

I could feel him breathing. He yawned, then closed his eyes, as I set him, stomach down, onto the couch. His back was warm against my hand. I settled into the chair and watched him, and the sun rose and shone through the window.

He slept on the couch and I watched him wake up. I thought of a name for him, though I never called him by it, and I held him on the porch in the evening, before I set him down to sleep, and repeated it.

On afternoons, when he could walk, I took his hand and walked with him into the field toward the hill. We watched the birds. We listened as they flew into the sky or followed as they entered with their wings pressed tightly against them.

I heated water on the stove and watched steam rise as I poured cooler water into it. Then I lifted him and set him, feet first, into the tub. I passed a cloth across his back. I held his head in one hand, and poured water over his hair with the other. The beads caught on his lashes, and he blinked, and they rolled down his cheeks as he laughed.

One morning, he reached up and pulled at my shirt. When I looked down, he folded his hands beneath his arms, then pressed them against his body. They called and sang their songs for us. They dove and fell into the shadow of the hill. He jumped once, then stood quietly.

When I woke, the couch was empty. The door was open, and a wind came through the room, pushing against my hair. I could see the hill in the distance. As I got closer, the birds were singing, and I saw him standing there, arms outstretched, and what I had imagined as the birds calling to each other, was him singing and the birds answering, and coming to him from the hill.

I called out to him, but my voice was lost in it, and he didn’t hear me.

Wild Cakes certainly lives up to its name with this sweet take on spaghetti and meatballs made with buttercream pasta, strawberry jam pasta sauce, Ferrero Rocher meatballs and shaved white chocolate parmesan.

More here from mental_floss. (Via @nypl_menus.)

This kind of play always gets me excited. It’s easier for me to remember opening lines I like, though, because the ones I don’t like don’t stay with me. But there’s no denying that dislikes shape us too. Writing an opening sentence in a fiction is like walking up to a stranger on the street and saying excuse me…. In real encounters like this, all of human nature waits in that moment of turning to look at the person. We have secret lists of near-future possibilities waiting: panhandler? thief? long-lost friend? detective….? And we start considering the list before we actually even see the person. I like opening sentences that don’t let me feel comfortable about my list or my impulse to apply it. I like opening lines that say — something interesting is already happening. This power only comes when everything down to punctuation and single word choice is significantly managed.

Here’s a favorite opening sentence:

“I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a — wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head — tunnel) actually lived.”

(Denis Johnson, “Dirty Wedding”; I love the risks here — the work that can be wrung out of a precisely selected comma splice, for instance, and the way the parenthetic comment ends by slamming into an almost forgotten context.)

And of course simple can also be good: “In the kitchen, he poured himself another drink and looked at the bedroon suite in his front yard.”

I drive to IKEA.

I had Chick-fil-A for lunch.

Update:

Yes, I took the brunt of it but not because there was a ballot on it but because I know knavery when I see knavery. Plus underhandedness and mischief.

– Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions

EDIT: The link has been edited to point to the relevant day forever.

She is soft and smells nice. Talks on the phone all day. Makes your favorite meals without being asked. Throws your Maxim magazines on the floor when she’s angry with you. Is sad when an animal gets hurt. Loses your car keys. Asks your opinion and listens to your response as if it matters. There’s more.

That one time: the time you were an asshole and made her cry. You knew your words hurt her—her face never conceals emotion (another thing about her you cannot stand). Then she punched you right in the penis bone; a solid uppercut with a lot of follow through. She really put her knees and back into it. That’s when you remembered you hated her kickboxing classes and all of those softball games, too.

You are certain she has never understood the innermost you. She does not appreciate what you do for her—like making it possible for her to tell people she is with you. When you yell at her or mock her it’s not personal, you are simply sharing your feelings. Dumbass bitch.

She is self-conscious about her breasts. Too small, shaped funny, pointed towards the wrong compass points, whatever. What are you talking about, you’d say, they’re fine. Perfect. She consulted a plastic surgeon about a boob job. The doctor examined her, shook his head, buttoned up her shirt, and kissed her hand. Without speaking, he strode out of his office and never practiced again. She started wearing sweaters two sizes larger.

A year and a month ago, she walked down the limestone steps and past her car, and kept going up the street. You stood in the doorway and watched her until she turned on Hudson Avenue by the Walgreens. Lately you are starting to think she is not coming back. Her stuff is still all around the apartment, pretty much as she left it. You think it is, but you’re not sure. You don’t remember what is hers and what is yours.

I could use a nice big dresser.