Simon Thomas

Simon Thomas lived two blocks from his work but he never did work there. He worked at his home.
Simon Thomas painted one painting a day and would not go to sleep until the paints were dry.

Tompson's November

“So that’s how it’s going to end?” Tompson asked out loud.
There was no body around, and he had been alone like this for a bit of a long time. It had only been one or a few minutes, maybe ten minutes, but his brain was working frantically. He would like to have imagined that he was as frantic as a boy who swam too deep and was coming up too short with not enough air.
The wind blew the leaves all around, which showed Tompson little of their promised autumn colors. Brown seemed to be the fashionable black of this month. So be it. Brown could be black.
November was hardly a month of fall; rather it would properly fit in winter. It felt, now, like a dirty brown, snow-less Christmas Eve, he thought. Christmas Eve, Tompson thought, didn’t belong in November.

A Phone Call at Night

Phone rings four times and answering machine picks up at the same time so that it does that thing where it’s saying “Hey, blah blah cute joke blah blah leave a message,” while both parties are on the line trying to say hello. Then the machine records both sides of the conversation thinking it’s a message.

Frank: How could you just let a girl come between us?

Harry: Frank. It’s very late. How late is it? Jesus, it’s late. Don’t call my house when you’re like this Frank.

Frank: We were friends.

At this point Frank should gulp a big old, soggy breath of air before his next line.

Frank: We were good friends.

Harry: Yes, Harry. We were. Now, we are not good friends. Go home and stop calling me when you’re like this.

Frank: How could you let her just come between us?

Harry: Frank, you slept with my wife.

Frank: You never got over that. Did you?

Mommy and me

Mommy and I going fishing in the sea
mommy caught no fish, I caught three
I saw the devil;
I saw heaven.
I threw in a pebble
and took out seven.

The Cross and His Mother

Croxley “the Cross” Hammond was not an ugly man. “You’re a beautiful boy,” his mother told him seasonally. His mother had been told by her obstetrician, “there are no ugly children walking on God’s earth, only ugly souls.” Hammons mother pretended to put the Cross in his crib without questioning always whether there were any of God’s children walking His earth with souls as ugly as her baby.

Matthew's One Sentence

If Matthew had committed a crime—he would never have committed a crime and had never been a criminal, even in his youth—then witnesses to his crime would describe his face to the police sketch man so poorly that the artist, vainly preventing his imminent headache, would press his thumbs into his temples.

Taylor and the Ditch

Taylor had style. He bought shoes often and wore his pants according to the trends of male actors. He carried a list in his pocket of common French phrases being used by modern celebrities.
With others he practiced abusive politeness. He loudly blessed sneezers and even more loudly laughed out loud in public. He imagined that his laughs were a pleasant way of sharing with everybody else how happy he was. Above all else, Taylor was popularly liked but not well liked. At him any man would bob his head, and all of the women sprinkled hellos. Busy accepting bobbed heads and sprinkled hellos, Taylor still could call no man or woman friend enough to pull him out of a ditch if that sort of situation ever arose.
Taylor was stuck in a ditch not too far from the city sidewalk. Approximately, his to the sidewalk was three yards. Many people with whom Taylor was not a friend enough to pull him out of a ditch passed by Taylor but they were not friends enough to pull him out of the ditch.

Chris, Joseph and Chris's Mother

Chris thought it had more to do with family, though that’s not how he felt under different circumstances. Joseph always felt and thought the same, though he did not always feel or think the same as Chris. Chris would debate with Joseph frankly at first but always allow himself to slip in buttery metaphors.
Joseph waited outwardly patiently but yearned inside to hurry though Chris’s succinct, boring inauguration and relieve his salivation upon florid, symbolic imagery. Chris knew as he juiced his imagination on to Joseph that he was most certainly not telling the truth. Lying sounded intentional and cruel. Chris rather thought of himself as a romantic troubadour of relatable fiction.
At his childhood home, he had read many books aloud to his mother She would sit him on the foot of the bed and fall asleep to his voice. She never learned English and she had never listened to the words Chris would read aloud to her. Chris, with his mother in bed beneath the earth of Eastfield Cemetery, felt as much a liar now orating his imagination to Joseph as he did reading a foreign language to his mother.
Joseph knew English very well and knew Chris’s mother very poorly. Joseph was glad to hear allusions to Chris’s mother in grand illusions of love’s ambivalence. Chris enchanted Joseph with his mother’s Vestal-Virgin glow, he said to be so bright in order that her luminance would his her cerebral dullness.
Lies felt good to Chris. If he thought hard at the foot of his bed when he could not sleep he would think himself into a dream. Roses smelt just as sweet even to his mother who knew not their name to speak of them.

Theo and Alec

Theo reminded Alec of a dolphin at the Shed Aquarium he had visited in Chicago. Alec thought of Theo as any dolphin, really; the one at the Shed was only the particular dolphin he imagined when the connection snapped into place in his mind. When his family visited the Shed on the day after his seventh birthday, he remembered that the tour guide pointed at a pregnant dolphin, “Dolphins never fall to sleep. Their brains are in two parts like ours, but instead of sleeping all at once a dolphin puts one half its brain to sleep while the other half is working,” she said.
Theo was so dead sometimes that Alec thought half Theo’s brain must be always asleep.

My Math Professor and I

My math professor and I had the same shoes on again today. He’s not old. He’s actually a graduate student, not even thirty. Probably not even twenty-five. I guess it would be better if he were older.