#compound art

  Breakfast feels very different than dinner. Especially since last night was, well there’s no other way to say it, a bit over the top, or was that under the weather.  Marco’s parties are always the best. The girls he finds are ou-la-la. The barbecue so tender and the burgundy! The port moved with us into the card room and the old whiskey buoyed me up when I lost. But I am never so good at cards.…

During the first years she was unremarkable, like any other weather-worn space of land where glacier erratics mixed with mismatched bits of local rock and sand. Then animals crawled out of the ocean on four legs and later on two. Their wanderings packed the soil into a hunter-gathering route that gradually curved along her eastern side. She began to sense herself to be apart. More men arrived,…

A good girl, Daisy followed her mother into that art gallery because she’d insisted they needed to get a bit of culture. All around the first room there were pictures that to Daisy’s eyes seemed much too alike. In the next room the pictures also appeared to be nearly but not quite identical. Room after room the drawings continued to show the same old woman sitting in that same chair facing…

If Arnie Philbert asked his father about his mother Mr. Philbert would always get out the boy’s birth certificate that proved her name had been named Eleanor Philbert and her death certificate that showed she had died on the day that Arnie was born. Then Mr. Philbert would repeat how when the nurse had put the bundle in his arms he hadn’t known how to go on. The baby was so little. How was he to…

Everyone agreed that from birth Bartholomew had been an exceptionally clever boy but now that he was nearly thirty-five they had begun to suggest that he had lost his edge. All his cousins were settled into little domestic circles of bliss but he hadn’t even found a girl who interested him or, for that matter, a girl who was interested in him. Not everyone desires to marry a rather plain,…