wearily at the walmart
The signs boasted ‘unbeatable’ but from where I stood, things looked broken. From the waxy de-laminating floors to the pairs of plastic shoes hanging—off-gassing and strung together like fish.
I wandered the aisles, filling my basket with 5.99, 2.39, 1.29, weaving through mothers struggling behind strollers and old people wearing worn sneakers and furrowed brows.
The construction out front was marked by cryptic posters: ‘ Wait for the WOW!’ they read, but I for one, was not dying of anticipation. I hurried by a stack of cinder-blocks, a story high, teetering near the doors.
As for you Walmart, I used to fear your belligerent ‘Beware of Falling Prices! and you ceaseless expansion, but today I just felt sorry for any malice I may have wished on you and yours. As if you are, in some small way, a symbol of the promise of America; your decline a view to what we might become.
Read more about Walmart here.
Or for fun, consider this: Big box stores, like our lives, are cluttered with objects. My friend Hope just launched a site about the stories behind objects called both Life with Objects. Read it, write for it. Enjoy!
Photos by Billy
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Filed under fiction, photographs, the world we live in | Comment (0)the episode, final
Here is the final installment of Jarrod, his mother, and their days of judgment.
Jarrod’s mother is holding up the backpack between them, like a trophy. Her cheeks sag even as she smiles at him. Her shirt is stretched open in front between the buttons, the fabric pulling. Her skin looked boiled and pink like canned meat.
-I was straightening up, she says, And look here what I found by the door…
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Filed under Podcast, short story | Tags: charlottesville podcast, Short Stories | Comment (0)swim
How did this happen so fast? One day, at the ACAC, William learned to swim, to flip even. How did he master this complex move of muscle and air? I remember when he couldn’t even push up, when crawling seemed a miracle.
Which everyday feats, preformed by loved ones, amaze you?
video by Billy
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Filed under family matters, motherhood, photographs, video | Tags: kid swimming | Comment (0)billy is a sail
Billy is a sail. He puffs up and tugs us way out when the wind is right. To William’s delighted squeals, we take a trip, a risk, try something new.
Billy is billowy, easy to spot even from a distance. I see the two of them–father and son—way out there and so happy to be together that it almost hurts.
Most days, I am the steady plodding one. I drop William off, kiss his cheek at the gate, check to make sure he has everything. He tromps inside to put his lunch in his cubby, and when he returns his big eyes bob briefly past the playground—past the sandbox, where all his friends unearth and bury things–and settle on me.
I imagine I am not all not that easy to see, holding still and blending in with the blue-green foliage by the gate. But he trusts that I am there waiting to be found. Briefly, his eyes meet mine and he smiles, mouthing bye momma before turning to play.
I feel like the rudder then: unseen, understated, but necessary too.
Will and his friend Quinn, Cape Charles
Photos by Billy
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Filed under family matters, motherhood, photographs | Comments (3)the episode, part 1
I have a secret love for TV judge shows: Judge Judy, The Judy, The People’s Court. I know its wrong: all those people airing their dirty laundry for a few dollars and my entertainment, but I can’t help myself. And those judges with their TV smiles, highlighting the chaos then making order from it, like a perfect short story. Here is my story, The Episode, which starts with 13 year old, defendant Jarrod.
Jarrod knows that his mother is big, but on the episode she is chunky, hefty, obese. The camera adds pounds to her massive breasts and bulging stomach. In pans to better show her thighs: pink rolls of flesh of flesh beneath a frayed jean mini-skirt.
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Filed under Podcast, fiction, short story | Tags: charlottesville podcast, Judge Judy, podcast stories | Comment (0)you as your own art project
This is William’s tree. I chose and photographed and painted it back in the spring as part of a graduate color class. This tree, its versions, and all the things I learned while making it are forever linked to William.
The thing about art projects, I tell WIlliam and my students, is that the real result is you. You are your own project, I try to tell them.
And all those hours, choices, struggles—even those framed final pictures up on the wall or packed away—none of it matters as much in the end as what the making of it does in you.
Snapshots of student masks and tree by me; photo of painting by Billy
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Filed under art, drawings, photographs | Comment (0)three women, three books
I take it as a very good sign that three women have given me three books already this summer.
One, a recommendation, and the other two: paperbacks placed in my hands with trust and pleas of safe return, as if these broken-spine books were something really special—and they are.
The set is stacked in a pyramid on my nightstand, arranged big to small. I’m reading them all together, flipping in and out a chapter or section at a time. It’s like diving into three distinct worlds, three different writers’, three unique women.
Mary Jane generously handed over Tinkers, by Paul Harding, a recent small press Pulitzer Prize winner which reads like poetry and air-conditioning—thanks to those New England winters.
And also, from KP, Drop City by T.C. Boyle—clever commune research for the screenplay I’m supposed to be drafting.
And finally, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl, which reads like an erudite Veronica Mars episode but with annotations. I would not have even picked this book up—it has the word ‘Physics’ in the title—but for librarian goddess Heather’s encouragement.
One book I’d like to lend to you is The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi Durrows, which is gentle and brutal at once.
Take care of it. Pass it on.
Wonder what it says about me,
About you.
Enjoy.
What books would you like to pass on this summer?
Photo ( at top of post) by Billy
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Filed under fiction, photographs, reading | Comments (3)some other girl, final
She showed me the bruises on Monday in the locker room. They were mostly on the soft part of her upper arms, dark shadows shaped like giant thumbs. I tried to look away, back at her face, but the thin skin around her hairline had broken out in tiny red bumps. her gym clothes were rumpled and dirty. She pressed deeply into her bruises with pale fingers.
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Filed under Podcast, fiction, short story | Tags: charlottesville podcast, podcast stories | Comment (0)