FireVaney

This thing won’t stop beep-beep beeping.   The “attendants” are apparently unconcerned.   They can hear it.   The door is open.   Their desk--I can see it--is feet from this room.   But, as I am not the only one here, these “attendants” may have more “important” things to do.   After all, there are many other invalids up and down the corridor; many who behave as if theirs is the only room in the joint.   I am not such an individual.   I am not The World, I am of the world; and I am proud to say so.   True, I could , once again, press the button to summon an attendant.  When I summoned one before, with the appropriate button, they were, it must be said, admirably prompt in responding, and in their promptness, admirable in silencing the beep-beep beeping.  However, they left only minutes ago--two minutes, forty-three seconds ago, to be precise (I’ve kept count; I’ve little else to do; the view offers nothing but a dirty brick wall--although perhaps it is the pane that is dirty, t

A young woman sits cross-legged in a grassy field.   She is set--aside from a single, dispersed contrail--against a pale blue sky.   A notebook computer is flipped open in her lap; its make is unknown.   She is wearing a white and blue cami with spaghetti straps, a scoop neckline, and a hieroglyphic pattern; her blue jeans appear to be cut out of van Gogh’s The Starry Night ; her flip-flops are aqua-blue.   Black hair curls down to her bronze shoulders.   She sits frozen, her arms and fingers stretched all the way out, palms up.   Her face is tilted skyward.   It is, however, difficult to conclude whether she is thankful, or incensed; whether she is worshipping the sun, or cursing it to Hell.   Below this photo, the card Veolia Environmental Services sent reads:   “Help us help you.   Enroll now!”

* No matter how hot it gets, never buy a Wexford Portable 2-Speed, 6-inch Table/Desk Fan. Without warning, and for no reason at all, it will start screaming at you --much like a caged feral cat in heat-- in the middle of the night; and it will continue to do so no matter how much WD-40 you squirt at it. (At approximately 2:30 a.m. last night, this was the situation at the FireVaney residence.) *

The man tried to express himself.  He failed.  “Bloated,” he wrote. “Vegetables,” he wrote.  “Bloated with vegetables,” he revised. He then continued with: “Trouble spelling ‘vegetables.’”  He misspelled “vegetables” at every attempt to write it.  Then autocorrected every instance.  Why?  Because “vegetables,” he rationalized, must not be misspelled.  “No,” he told himself.  “Not true.  A lie.”   But who posited it?  A liar did.   He did.  The truth:  He autocorrected out of fear.  “Autocorrected, fearing scorn.  Unarticulated scorn.  Your scorn,” he concluded.  “ Your scorn is sensed.”  He wrote it down, too.  “Before you’ve read this, your scorn is sensed.”  He refuses to take responsibility.   “Blame vegetables,” he wrote.  “Go ahead.  Blame ‘em.”  And then this dawned on him: “Vegetables provide no salvation.”  He proceeded to cling to this notion.  “ Who said they did?  Somebody did.  Somebody said.”  But he could not think up who.  Who might’ve said.  “Give me

Willard grabbed the tennis ball and lobbed it at the window.  When the ball struck, the windowpane cracked.  Willard picked the ball up and lobbed it again.  This time, the windowpane shattered.  One down, twenty-six to go.  Willard grabbed another tennis ball. Hanna was upstairs in her room, reading Tartuffe by Molière, when she heard the first crash of glass, and then the second.  She grrr-ed, scraped her chair back, grrr-ed at the tear the chair’s legs had made in the carpet, stood, grrr-ed at the crick in her back, limped out to the staircase, grrr-ed at the limp, and leaned over the rail.  She shouted, “Everything alright?” After lobbing yet another ball to smash a third windowpane, Willard replied, “Yup!”  Twenty-four to go. By the time Hanna managed to limp all the way down the stairs, and then hobble all the way back to the sunroom, grrr-ing every step of the way, Willard had smashed all the windowpanes in the northernmost wall.  “Ah,” said Hanna, after a deep breath, “fres