Beyond Furniture & Fixtures,
Fixed Assets incl of Plant
& Machinery, Goodwill incl
Of Green Donation & Tree
Trimming Vehicle
You will only be heard
When the noise
Has died down
And the air so clear
You can hear
The soundless
Soundtrack of bats
By ROLF POTTS
Thailand, 2001
1.
In the fall of 2001, while I was living in the south Thailand border town of Ranong, I had a brief love affair with an Australian woman named Eva. I first met her on the swimming-pool veranda of the aging hotel where I was renting a studio for $150 a month. Travelers would occasionally pass through Ranong to renew their Thai travel visas at the Burmese border, and Eva had just returned from a visa run with a British couple I’d met the day before. That night the four of us went out to drink whiskey and sing karaoke at a local nightclub. The following morning, the British couple headed north for Bangkok, and Eva moved her things into my room.
from The Ridiculous American
Julie stands alone looking at a cornucopia of flowers. She is quite a bit shorter than one would imagine, and younger looking too, very fit, with dark brown bangs, tastefully blonde-streaked, fringing her sunglasses. She wears old green cotton pants (cargo pants?) and looks nothing like a movie star.
Jock: Are you Julie?
(She doesn’t turn. Should I leave this person who might not be Julie alone-— and who also may be Julie and is not turning around because she just wants to look at flowers? Probably. But I did bike all the way into town to talk to her. A few moments of courage-gathering. A trifle louder.)
1.
The bus doors opened and the kids tumbled out. Jesus, they were terrifying. Sunburned, long-legged, mosquito-bitten, and hood-eyed, all of them in camp T-shirts with the signatures of friends and bunkmates, and the older girls with the signatures on their T-shirts bumping over the lines of their bra-straps. The wind came off the Hudson.
By ROBIN MCLEAN
That was Mike hanging in the brass chandelier. He was Tarzan with a crew cut and farm boy grin, swinging upside down. Hilarious. Mel could get Mike to do anything.
1.
I was twelve when my family shared a big gray house on Fire Island with the McKennas. The house was at the end of a series of narrow boardwalks, just over a small dune from the ocean, which was easily visible from our veranda. I believe the house also had a sundeck off of one of the upstairs bedrooms, because I have a vague memory of someone—my mother, I think—telling me not to disturb Mrs. McKenna, who liked to sunbathe “in the nude.” I had never heard that expression before and, at first, could not believe I had understood it correctly. Only the weird blend of excitement and disapproval in the voice of whoever was speaking convinced me that my interpretation was exactly right. I have no memory of the sundeck itself, however, nor of ever seeing Mrs. McKenna in anything more revealing than a one-piece bathing suit.
Maps are one way humans make sense of their environment. In this age of Google Earth, where a few mouse clicks call up a satellite image of almost any inch of the globe, it can be difficult to imagine a time when maps were often based as much on hearsay and guesswork as scientific surveying.
In this island human corpses are not buried and do not putrify,
but are placed in the open and remain without corruption.
Here men see with some wonder and recognize their grandfathers,
great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers,
and a long line of ancestors.
—Topographia Hiberniae, Giraldus Cambrensis (1220)
I have seen them in other guises, in dreams or along wind-blown streets here and across the sea
where they go by with a nod or sometimes not, benign or monstrous, familiar passers-by
and now it is I who pass before them where they recline, still upon the rain-polished limestone,
each in his own bed
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.