richglinnen

[richglinnen]

On the Clock

Passing one another in the library, we nod like coworkers, as we dutifully follow our bosses by distances that might allow a conga line of kidnappers to seamlessly merge into.

Mine leads me to the play area, which is carpeted with a grinning clock. She hops to each hour, shouting its number upon each descent, as I collapse into the readied embrace of its unbudging hands.

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[richglinnen]

Last Name

While looking at my teammate’s bowling scores, my eyes slid to his last name, which I’ve never heard spoken, and wasn’t entirely sure how to pronounce. Despite the double vowel, I knew it had to be something like “wig,” but maybe there was a long I sound in there. Who knows. He’d know. But I don’t know him well enough to ask. Then there’s the fact that I don’t really care

as much as I care about why people, myself included, need to make things more complicated than they are. Is it simply because we are thoroughly complicated, with our trillions of cells making up the seamless bricks of our subway tunnel-organ systems, which inexplicably connect to the evolving languages constituting our emotions and thoughts, all the way to the elaborate handles floating invisibly above our heads?

That is, until someone takes an interest in us, and asks, “Excuse me, how do you pronounce your last name?” Providing us with the answer, we repeat it cautiously and respectfully, and suddenly the great gate of their world rattles open, permitting us entry, and all with a password that has been staring us in the face this entire time.

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[richglinnen]

Prize

My wife wound up making, what I thought, was a device to safely view the eclipse without damaging your eyes, because four different stores were sold out of the special viewing glasses.

But, in fact, it was just a projector, composed of a Cheerios box, tape, a pin, and tin foil.

It works like this: you turn your back to the phenomenon, let the eclipsing sun shine whatever it has left into the pinhole made in the tin foil, and watch the spectacle’s shadow in the bottom of the cereal box: a tiny dot slowly whittling into a cat’s nail.

At some climactic moment, it might seem like you are looking at an empty cereal box. Tsk-tsk. You are actually experiencing what you’ve been waiting all week for: Totality.

All in all, it felt like I was being punished for waiting to buy the Magic Glasses until the day of by being relegated to the cheap seats, while my elderly neighbors were sitting orchestra, each taking in the upstaged sun from their shadow-washed lawn chairs, passing a pair of glasses between them.

Don’t tell anybody, but I did sneak a peek, repurposing the “projector” as a visor. My eyes don’t hurt too much. They might not even hurt at all. It could just be the worrying that’s making them ache. But I did catch a glimpse of the eclipse, and I got to say, it belonged in the bottom of a cereal box.

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[richglinnen]

Man Cave

There’s a little stepstool, smeared with jelly, atop the kitchen table. How it got on the table is a long story. How it got in the house is a mystery.

Someone either bought it for the kids, or it was the result of one of my wife’s fugitive spending sprees. I don’t know where it came from, because I’m the dad, and dads don’t know about that sort of thing.

Usually, our heads are cluttered like garages with home repair information, or hockey stats. But mine is rather empty, and I like it like that.

Yeah, I suppose I could learn to remember who got us what. It would be an exercise in gratitude that could lead to feeling more thankful for our loved ones.

But when I look at the glittery foam rose that’s moved into my fern’s bachelor pad, I think I would rather be an aloof dad, and keep at least one room cleared, even if it’s only in my mind.

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[richglinnen]

Stomach Bug

She sleeps with her hands over her head, like an invisible force is holding her up at gunpoint for her puke. All the puke. She’s already given all she has, bucketfuls of the stuff. But it wants more, whatever it is, this terrible thing that knows I would snatch out its eyes if it dared to show its face.

Again, it prods her belly with the barrel and my daughter—the little woman she is—obliges because she has no choice, and chooses the path of non-violence, even if she can only give phlegm and bile.

Her brother stands in his crib, steady as a knife, gripping the rail in the blackness, held back, forced to watch what we can all see because we’ve been here long enough for our eyes to get used to it.

Some gets in her hair. Where exactly, we can’t be sure, but something tells me she doesn’t want us to know, that it’s a peace offering by way of self-mutilation, a sacrifice. She falls asleep again, her arms at her sides like an empty Christ.

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[richglinnen]

Tag

When I tuck her in, I must make sure the tag on her blanket is down by her feet. If not, she will say, “Daddy, I don’t want the tag.”

She doesn’t elaborate, but I know it’s because it’s uncomfortable: a coarse tongue, even more talkative than her, that will keep her up all night with the same snippet of blanket stories that seems to go on without end:

how it was made in Vietnam, and needs to be machine-washed in cold water, and how you can hang-dry it, even though almost everybody sticks it in the dryer— at least that’s the word at the ‘mat— and, even though it might not seem it, does not contain even one fiber of cotton. 100% polyester, baby!

But tonight, she will go unscathed, for I arranged her blanket the way she likes it, so she can dream in a place unfettered by facts or instructions, a place my adult mind can’t even begin to imagine, but, for lack of something better, let’s just say

it’s atop the highest peak of Cookie Mountain, where she can look out her French windows and see the clouds of milk forming a lake below, and once she’s had her fill of likening various formations to mommies and daddies and dinosaurs, she will turn away and dance on her tippytoes, for, in this climate, the restless floorboards tend to warp into balloons, and then she will sing in a language she can speak perfectly to the loyal stuffed animals that made the trek to her purple castle, which she made with, believe it or not, 100% crayon, baby.

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[richglinnen]

First Day of Spring

is typed in tiny italics on the bottom of only one square in the entire flip calendar laid out before me on the kitchen table— or any calendar for that matter, regardless of whose kitchen it haunts— and is the only of its kind, not just for this reason,

but because, unlike its painted-over brethren, it opens like a window when the sacred day comes to pass, just as it does now under my ponderous face, at once terminating the endless banks of white that have piled up week by week, with a swath of blue sky, blinking open after a long and deserved hibernation,

and against my cheeks and nose and closed eyes brushes the air exuded by a tremendous yawn: a miraculously bearable, scentless breath, promising flowers; and into my eager ears the yawn hums the springtime sounds it carries on its wispy boughs: the droning of obese bumblebees, the distant tapping of elusive woodpeckers, the screeching of blue jays resuming their omnipresent conquest, the bassy music of Jay-Z from an idling car,

not to mention the creaking of barbecue grills, the clatter of cutlery and thudding of cupboards, the proud chuckling of the last landline in town, and the greeting that results, always too loud, as if this particular grandma was saying hello to you, and in a way, she is, for it is now spring,

and high time for these sounds, and more, who have grown tired of being cooped up all winter, to swarm my kitchen until it is chocked full and there is nowhere left for them to go, except to run, like children, skidding out into the street— just beginning its life anew with the first few scuffy heartbeats of hopscotch— as the flapping screen door behind them bangs away its au revoir,

and the sounds of neighboring houses embrace and spin blissfully into the air, past the telephone wires, where they sing joyfully together songs never before heard, never before possible,

(even though they were performed around this time last year, but whose memory can actually cross winter’s plains and remain intact?). Moreover, who even has the time to remember

when there’s juicy gossip to trade: tales of marriages and careers failed, burgeoning addictions, a cursory glance at who lost weight so they can segue into who got fat,

until they are reduced to whispers and crickets, spent under the streetlights and purpling sky, and all that’s left to recount is the humdrum of their hermit lives, during a time they can scarcely believe they existed, when the trees held up leafless branches as modest as magic wands.

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[richglinnen]

After I Finished

It was sex night, and, after I finished, I was handed The Device, as is our routine. She could tell right away it was dying. She could sense it, the way cats do when they lie on the still frames of hospice patients.

But it felt fine to me, buzzed with the same miniature fury like always, when we conspired in the bedroom to not watch Seinfeld until sleep snuffed us out.

Eventually The Device rattled like a fly trapped between a shutter and a window. I mean it really started to die. It was even obvious to me. I unscrewed it and small silver batteries fell onto the exposed mattress, the ones typically used in hearing aids.

She went off into the kitchen, jangling open drawers, knowing it was futile, but still, she had to check, while my genitals and I lounged on the bed.

She returned empty-handed. I suggested using my hand. She said ok. After a while she said it wasn’t going to happen. “You’re just as good as the machine,” she said. “I’m just used to things.”

We lied there in the dark a little longer, and I thought about the kids’ toys sleeping beside each other under the thin covers of the shadows blanketing the living room floor, and wondered if any of those might contain the right batteries, but concluded it was very unlikely and not even worth mentioning.

As she edged closer, I figured I might have time to smoke a cigar after all, so maybe I wouldn’t have a piece of cake and relish in an even larger calorie deficit. I always have to have something to look forward to.

Then she laid her head on my bare chest and pointed out that the streetlights coming through the blinds gave my thighs stripes, like I was a wild animal.

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[richglinnen]

Woman on a Treadmill

There’s a girl—and I say girl—not a woman, but a girl— who is at the gym. And she is a girl because she’s around my age. If she was the one writing this, I would be a boy, but I’m not even going to entertain the thought.

You see, I’m not allowed to like her because I’m married. In fact, I can’t really say that I do like her, for we’ve never spoken. But I like how she looks, which I’m ashamed to admit, because I’m still married, even after all these lines.

Were I to approach her one afternoon, I think she would let me down kindly: her saintly eyes might smile with amusement, flattered, her pale chest might even blush, but I know for certain she would withhold any disgust,

as she wrapped me like a newborn in the #1 Dad shirt I was wearing, walked me back to where I was before I bothered her, and lowered me gently, like only a woman can, onto the soft, yet adhesive mat of a treadmill located a ways behind hers,

where I can resume my ogling from the comfy confines of my crib, which offers a slivery jailhouse view— a promise that will never break, nor come true.

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[richglinnen]

Deniability

Bigger kids ask little ones if they still believe in Santa. Still. A perfect question for a perfect devil.

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[richglinnen]

hi! I think your writing is lovely and just wanted to pop by to tell you. Also a little tip is to have a profile pic and backround pic so people don't assume your a bot!

Thank you very much, I appreciate you.

Beep boop beep,

Rich