His daughter used to say his best pieces shimmered, shimmered like the pond behind their cabin under the moonlight. She’d dance out there, when it shimmered. She’d glide and twirl and spin under the gaze of the stars. “A show for the aliens,” she called it. A choreographed performance. A work of art.

"Nowadays, it’s hard to find a woman,” he says, “with a pretty face and pretty feet.”

I say, “Is that so.”

Laura was a beautiful blond from the mid west, with the perfect hippie vibe and fashion. She always had a stick of Nag Champa burning wherever she went, and a beautiful rainbow of an aura around her. She always seemed to have a sly smile, like she knew even more about the joke than anyone else. Of course I pretty much fell for her the moment I saw her.

I want a friend from the outside who will shatter my tea cup and throw me over their shoulder and take me outside. 

I met him at a skating rink. I was fourteen and tougher than any of those boys who tried to grab my waist with their short-fingered, sweaty hands when a slow song came on. I came to look fly in my Guess jeans. I came to skate backwards fast enough so that the air rushed past me and it felt like I could reverse time.

Three sixty-something year old intoxicated adult children who had been totally content tossing horseshoes at a protruding metal pole in a square sandbox decided to switch their afternoon sport to kite flying with a giant fighter kite attached to a fancy spool of glass coated hemp line. Maximus was wondering what we were up to and waited for the fun to begin.

The magazine she’s holding is three months old. It shakes lightly. It makes him think of a wounded bird struggling to fight its way out of her white, delicate fingers. He reaches over and places a clammy hand on her exposed thigh. The bruises look like faded tattoos. She recoils almost imperceptibly, more a tensing of her muscles than a move to pull away.