At 3am I woke freezing to find the batteries in the thermostat dead. The screeching drawers of an old desk yielded nothing from my housemates’ common property so I dug through my own for a pair of double-As, replaced them, and tossed in bed for an hour. My alarm didn’t rouse me on account of its newly dead triple-A. When I roused myself and checked the other clock, I figured if I was going to be late, I could be late. I showered a long hot shower and ate my oatmeal over email. I saw a coworker cleaning snow off his car. “I’m not going in today,” he said. “I’m going in late,” I said. He said that sounds like a plan. I stopped at a favorite cafe halfway to work for a green tea to go, and the barista said everyone has those days.
spam subjects as plot lines
drier paranoia albright windowsill inve
ministerial woke masterpiece vestigial
gusset brandt modus buret hetman
doomsday complaint shopkeep lying blurt
They fall out.
I have the house to myself. When sitting alone the rattles drop from my ear canal one by one between sofa cushions. We will never find them.
old roommate
She’ll say terrible things about me, all true. I asked her to compromise, knowing compromise against her principles, said I don’t have a problem with your alcoholic boyfriend staying but don’t let his idiot junkie friends think they’ve got a couch to crash when they can’t get to the clinic in time.
Rows and rows of houses
Take the bricked downtowns of trainstops, river towns, pre-war county seats (street lamps, hand-lettered windows, winter garland) carved out like sheet cake and tight packed. There you have Chicago beyond the Loop — a hundred small towns end to end. Having only know it through day trips as a towering, cramped, breakneck metropolis, “small town” Chicago is an image I doubted before moving to the city proper. Talking cities with a friend’s coworker, I admitted my anxiety over being somewhere so massive. “Chicago,” he explained with grace startling to one raised to expect pornographers brusque and greasy, “is a small town.”
Garlic with white wine, a clean napkin, the waitress’s perfume. Diesel, Mexican laundry, exhaled smoke, cut conifers, perfume.
Squinting against the sun on the Fullerton El platform this morning, I found a dent, chiseled a good quarter-inch deep, where the canopy funneled melting snow into the edge of a board. 33º, tomorrow’s high 18.