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Agoraphobia

1. My cancer is like a friend who screens me from those parts of the world from which I choose to disengage.
2. Matted tail. Yellow mucus hardening at the corners of his mouth.
3. Smoke. Black, gray, white.
4. I saw him on the bus one morning with a teenage girl in braces.
5. He walks with raised elbows, as if they were resting on fence posts to either side.
6. With her sister at the aquarium.
7. At lunch one day she leapt to my ear...
8. Cigarette ashes inside her car, thick like gray-white slush...
9. "Thank you," she said...
10. Afterwards her sister called.
11. There was a night when she glowed in the dark.
12. I saw a crippled man struggle with his aluminum arm-crutches.
13. In the dust on the old man's shelves...
14. We were driving west on I-10, from Austin back to California.
15. The way she leaves half-full ashtrays at points around the house...
16. Thin boys in a 1968 Chevy Nova, canary yellow.
17. 1992, bus stop, Larkin and Hayes.
18. She shows endless kindness to each of her tables, regardless of what rude or stupid behavior they summon in return.
19. Her resentment at the way stupid Americans pronounce her name:
20. Subject: dress up Mondays.
21. Sad, eaten away.
22. They let her go at the end of a working day...
23. "Story" as reactionary literary ideology.
24. With the help of her ex-husband we moved her heavy bed into her own apartment.
25. Sunshine. Yellow-gold. The color of the sky, vibrant blue, desert blue.
26. Sketch: John.
27. After my failure I wrote:
28. For two or three nanoseconds: lunchroom tables, voices, a blue and gray wash of everyday faces.
29. Market Street sidewalk, late afternoon. Angry light, angry shadows.
30. Afternoon sunlight on a pasture outside Hebo, Oregon.
31. "This is so much fun!"
32. Her picture on the rocks, Sunset Cliffs.
33. She's not sure she knows her birthday.
34. The sound of her voice as she plays with her beloved dogs.
35. I have no inner sense of the passage of time.
36. Oh no! An error occurred!
37. She was never able to sleep there.
38. In the restaurant there's talk of oil wells.
39. Tell me about us.
40. Sex as art.
41. The street level is given over to cars and heat.
42. That they're inept; that they're more like children than he'd ever been.
43. Three peculiar ideologies of the work which artists do.
44. Saw the sun break through clouds...
45. City busses, subway trains. Motion and mass.
46. Black curtains, black towels, black sheets...
47. From among the gray-white headstones a thin string dances.
48. Walk among the faux-Gothic headstones...

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This writing is fiction. Please don't confuse it with reality.
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