Through the glass wall of the elevator I watch the atrium floor fall away.  It's intimidating, the twenty storeys stretched above and below, layers of brightly lit but empty hallways, rectangular offices, lonely desks and long solemn conference tables surrounded by ghosts because it's now well after 5 PM and the living have evacuated for home. 

As the elevator rises higher I pretend to be in New York City visiting my some-day publisher, but this is not only for fun -- it's an…

The barn still needs painting, like it did six weeks ago when the paint was bought at Steven's Colors in town and it felt like a good idea. 

The unopened buckets are still beside the creaky barn door, red dirt kicked on the tops. 

Steven brushed a reminder of red on the top of each can, bright blood against the pale of the barn, tiny and vivid against large and vague.  The structure looks worse now than it did six weeks ago, drained and abandoned; painting…

Marcelle and I met through volunteer work.  She's about fifteen years older than I am, kind but bossy and opinionated, interested in what others know but not very interesting. 

She often sends me emails asking if I want to have lunch or go see a movie, closing with, "You're important in my life and I'm so glad we met."

As cruel as it sounds, I don't feel the same, don't feel a connection, and I've wondered how to handle such a situation without…

There are penguins and stars on my coffee cup and beside it a folded laminated map of New York City where I dream of having an apartment one day; there's a Christmas card from an aunt I lived with but haven't seen since 1992 (a reminder to write to her which I probably won't) and a 500 word story about a man named Gerald who compulsively genuflects with his tongue (three months old and destined for the trash can).

Beside Gerald's story is a lapis blue chalice with DIVA on one…

She pats my cheeks and eyelids with a pink ostrich feather, torn from the butt of a bird pen that has run out of ink.  

She puckers her moist pink lips then asks me to do the same as she applies "lipstick" with the dented tip of a plastic strawberry.  

Various swatches of patterned fabric are applied to my forehead, nose and chin like cool compresses to "clean away the day". 

She uses the orange lid of a juice cup as a "stamp" on my left…

I recently read that a single book can change with every reading, especially over large gaps of time during which we, the readers, change.

Seal once said that he doesn't like to offer interpretations of his songs because we each bring something of our own to the song, and this phenomenon is further complicated when a song is misheard, like forever I thought Manfred Mann sang, "Blinded by the light, wrapped up like a douche..." and misunderstood Macy Gray, "I blow…

We often snuggled under a quilt made from pieces of my outgrown clothes where we discussed the great mysteries that kept me awake, formless things -- why it hurt to love, what made darkness and water scary, why no one could agree on God's zip code or rules.

She took me with her to Beacon Baptist or Holy Family Catholic Church on Sundays, and part of our ritual was me pretending to be tired so I could sit in her lap like a frog, cheek to breast, her lilting voice a soothing…

DeweyPhilsner looked like Ron White - height, hair, smile.  We spent our weekly hour together talking about his wife, how after cancer treatment she was always gone with friends, on long weekend trips to the beach or traveling up north to visit family.  Then he'd disturb my sympathy with a serious invite to Mexico.  

I suspended judgement because Dewey was not a friend but a client, yet likable enough to blur the distinction, so I just kept listening while pounding his bare…

The panic that runs through all people, suppressed by religion or drugs or Jimmy Choo shoes -- I think it ran like sap from the Tree of Life, the tree of knowledge, of good and evil.  The split of consciousness -- when the happy couple woke and saw their naked parts and entered a paradoxical dimension -- caused the panic.  But it was the split that gave them consciousness.  They had to be aware of their mortality to experience life, to move and make choices.  

We are…

Peace...

...weighs the same as a coffee cup in a small town diner, slight but sturdy.

...has no editor, no inner critic, and even with bad eyes, does not wear glasses.

...smells like summer rain through a screen door, sounds like the rain, steady and white.

...will only visit cluttered minds when they sleep or daydream.

...is organic, avocado green or powder blue, and likes soft things - kittens, cotton, breezes…

When we're alone Beast tells me his ghost stories, and though he'd already mentioned the pale beauty with dark hair melting into his bedroom wall at Thanksgiving, I didn't stop him last weekend when he asked again who or what I thought she was.

"Guardian angel?" I said, knowing that's what he wanted to hear, then he smiled and said, "Well, that's what I -- don't know."

Then he mentioned the male angel who protected him during his three-hour drive to our house,…