I Saw Something Physically Impossible Today

At the corner of Sherman Street and 11th Avenue in Windsor Terrace. Note: there's stuff at the top of this pole that would make it impossible for the hoop to have been dropped from above. I suppose it has to come apart somewhere, but I didn't see any seam, so I prefer to think it was magic.

Please Don't Pack the Penguins

Seen on a recently received package: a delightful surprise of whimsical shipping iconography. Note the bow tie.

Consequences, Part IV

I am fourth in line in a pass-the-baton online writing game called Consequences, in which 11 fantastic writers each post a 250-word piece, beginning their leg with the final line of the previous post. The posts can be in any form and about anything we want, as long as they relate to a common theme: Abandoned Landscapes. Thanks to Wah-Ming Chang for administering this exercise with her ever-gentle iron fist.

Preceding me were Sam J. Miller, Jade Park, and Jane Voodikon. Next up: Anna Shapiro, who will post on wmcisnowhere.wordpress.com.

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I distinctly recalled hearing birds fighting, in normal bird squawk. How did I know they were fighting? No idea. Just one of those things you know even as you know you couldn't possibly, because birds sound the same whether they're fighting or telling knock-knock jokes or discussing politics.

The birds could have been in a dream—did they come before or after the talking deer?—but if I'd heard them for real, that meant the window was open. Which hadn't been the case last night. A telltale breeze blew over me, but I refused to open my eyes and see the other side of the bed. Even with my eyes closed I could tell it was empty. Which also hadn't been the case last night.

We'd known each other for three days—okay, not quite a relationship, but more than a one-night stand, which is something I would never engage in. I'd never even engaged in a third-night stand before, and now I'd woken to find my third-night stand having vacated the bed and escaped out the window, diminishing my hopes for a fourth night.

My apartment was on the second floor, and sneaking out would have been much easier via the front door than via the bedroom window. So how did I know he'd used the window? Same way I knew those birds were fighting, I guess. Besides, I hated to imagine the front door opening and closing—so banal. A leap out the window made the situation much more interesting.

On the Unreliable Narrator

"I'm making myself out to be a loony, unreliable narrator, which is the best kind of narrator to have, Jeeves. Allows you to get away with things, like not fact-checking. But he's not entirely unreliable. He's punctual and writes thank-you notes."

—Jonathan Ames, Wake Up, Sir!

Hadley Had a Boyfriend

When Hadley was five, her father got a new job and moved the family from Los Angeles to Connecticut. Hadley cried for hours after saying goodbye to her boyfriend, Jeremy. They had met in nursery school, where Hadley's favorite game was messing up Jeremy's floppy sand-colored hair until he reciprocated by yanking on her long braid. They had looked forward to stepping over the threshold of kindergarten together, not knowing what to expect but knowing they would face it together, holding hands—always with Hadley's other hand clutching her stuffed pony, Jeremy's other hand lost in his Dodgers glove.

Instead Hadley faced kindergarten alone, in the unfamiliar orange of a New England fall, in a town where the other kids all knew one another from nursery school or music class or swimming lessons. But she was bubbly and liked to share her chewing gum, and her isolation lasted only a few weeks. Soon she found herself in an unexpected flirtation with Brandon, who had accidentally slammed her foot in a car door at a particularly rushed carpool pickup one morning. Her foot was fine, but the flame of his apologetic gaze seared her heart.

Brandon held her hand until halfway through first grade, and he brought her laughter and joy and sometimes jellybeans, but he never succeeded in making her forget about her first love, and finally broke things off when she refused to stop referring to Jeremy as "my other boyfriend."

Hadley's dating life was uneventful for a while as she focused on grades and jazz dance and rebuffing mildly violent attacks from her older brother. Jeremy's parents and her parents had been friendly in California, and she would see Jeremy every couple of years when his family would visit New York and come up to Connecticut for Sunday brunch at Hadley's house. She would show him her swing set and her jazz dance moves, and they would play catch, even though she wasn't very athletic, which didn't matter at first because of the excitement of once again being in each other's company. She continued to refer to him as her boyfriend to her friends and family, though never in Jeremy's presence—there was no need.

But as she edged closer to puberty, Hadley found herself dreading rather than eagerly anticipating these occasional visits, for relationships based on occasional visits rarely work even for adults, much less for the young, with their ever-evolving personhood. Jeremy's obsession with his Little League stats proved tiresome (though she took heart in their agreement about the plain common sense of the designated hitter rule). Likewise, he found her love of horses too predictable for a girl, and struggled to pay attention when she showed off the wooden figurines she had painted and the photographs of her riding lessons. Her attempts at eliciting kisses brought nothing but a wrinkling of his nose in disgust.

Still, Hadley saw this awkwardness as only a phase in their relationship; they had always been fated to marry, after all, and all couples must endure hardships that will ultimately make their bond stronger. The slow fading of their parents' friendship and the cessation of Jeremy's visits brought relief—she loved him more easily from afar, at least for now. She would focus her energy on thinking of the perfect names for their children (she planned to surprise him by naming their first son Tommy, for Tommy Lasorda, a gesture he would never see coming!).

In middle school Hadley had no boyfriends, unless she counted Nick, who sat next to her in eighth-grade math and had a way of solving problems involving the speed of trains that made her feel a little faint. But that relationship progressed no further than sharing a table at lunchtime, and as much weight as lunchtime table-sharing carried in the eighth grade, Hadley still saw Nick as only a temporary distraction from her one true love.

The teen years, however, found Hadley's memories of Brandon fading, replaced by the immediacy of boys who touched her long strawberry blonde hair, or beamed with pride when she cheered them on at basketball games, or developed a sudden interest in acting when she won the lead in the senior class production of Spoon River Anthology. One boy did all three and earned the privilege of being the first to touch more than Hadley's hair, much more, a privilege she once had assumed would be Jeremy's, though she had imagined it only abstractly. At the moment it happened she suddenly thought of this old assumption and smiled at her youthful naivete, even as she felt a twinge of sadness at this new boy's not being Jeremy, and even as she began to plan her life with this new boy, from college through marriage and children and into old age, during which they would exchange grumpy-yet-loving banter in their own version of On Golden Pond.

She did go to college and have marriage and children, not with that boy or any of the next three but with an older boy, a man in fact, who could not have looked or behaved more differently than Jeremy looked or behaved—or at least the way she imagined Jeremy did, during the rare moments when she still wondered where he was or what he looked like as a thirty-two-year-old or whether he had a family of his own.

In middle age, Hadley's divorce brought the usual regrets and self-doubts and wishes that she could click her heels and start over. Sometimes those wishes involved Jeremy, and "what if," but they couldn't progress much beyond that, as she knew nothing about him past the age of twelve. It was easier to imagine "what if" with the boyfriends who had come later, closer to adulthood, though it was also easier to see the folly of imagining such things; there were, after all, good reasons they had left her, or she had left them. It was nicer to think of Jeremy, as their romance remained unblemished by yucky adult goings-on. But it was also sadder, as the only reason she could think of that they had left each other was geographical. And geography was just another word for bad luck.

Also, she had her children, a boy and a girl—a man and a woman, now, with a few boys and girls of their own, who had little boyfriends and little girlfriends just as Hadley had Jeremy. So she couldn't wish that she had married Jeremy and named their son Tommy, not in any real way. Only in those occasional shameful moments when she looked at her son's face and imagined what he would look like with the nose of the father he might have had, the nose that used to wrinkle when she tried to kiss it, the nose that she liked to think hadn't changed a bit since Jeremy was her boyfriend.