Fiction

 One. 

It began with a few grainy photos captured on a night vision trail camera: at the edge of the woods, bathed in lurid green light, was a group of children. Six of them, of various ages. None looked to be over ten, the smallest one a toddling baby. No one knew whose they were, or what they were doing on a stranger’s property in the middle of the night, or why they were just standing there. They stood for duration of three hours, according to the camera time lapse.

“I went to the funeral home today,” her grandmother said. A beginning. She had more that would come. 

“Oh? And how was it?” Michelle was a world away from her grandmother. She was in California, the land of dry heat and crisscrossing six-lane highways, sitting one and a half hours from the beach in a sea of smog. 

“It was fine.” 

I got arrested in Venice, Italy for taking a picture of a synagogue in in the ghetto. It was three-stories and catty corner in the square where a policeman was talking to a short man in an overcoat with a flipped-up collar. The pre-dusk light made for great shadows and I took a half dozen shots.

Henry and our wives showed up to go to dinner and I pointed at the tall synagogue to show Henry what I was shooting and there was a tug on my arm. It was the short overcoat guy. “Get rid of the pictures you took of me and the officer,” he ordered.

1.

(Foreigner, “I Want To Know What Love Is”)

You think Ricki is a narc. Then again, you think she isn’t. You don’t know because every decision you’ve ever made has sucked, right from the time you dropped like a brick from Alice’s womb. You remember her vaguely, from before they took her--long dark hair and tracked arms.

“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is: ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”

Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks

“Who would like to start?” Michael says as he taps his pencil on his notepad. 

Alexandra reaches into her purse, grabs a journal and holds it triumphantly into the air and exclaims, “I will start.”

I recognize my journal and sink into my chair. The journal contains an idea I once had for a work of satire, maybe for the theatre, perhaps the big screen. I was sure my Orwellian piece would go further than my now estranged wife using it against me in couple's therapy.

Several years ago, unable to rent an apartment, I sublet one in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I didn’t bring much, --- some clothes, random papers, German tea, flax oil, hair conditioner I’d been rationing for seven years.