Edgar and the Thumb Lady

Standing in his gutted living room-slash-studio in a scary gutted out end of Saginaw, Billy shows me two red clay figurines. I hold them in the palm of my hand like baby birds. Billy is an East Coast Upper Middle Class Ideal Giving It All Up For Art, I am a Small Town Working Class Chance He Will Take. We live two hours and several social classes apart. We are only a month or two new, possibilities not yet formed, nothing set in concrete.

Like the clay, I become another project. He says he will teach me everything I should know, should have already known. I am a foreigner in his country of art and intellect.  I crave love, he requires a muse. I careen into him, a moth singing the tips of my dusty wings with sparks.

The Death Professional

I was assigned my first hospice patient about this time of year, green tulip shoots were trying to push through the last of the spring slush, the sun felt weak and gave little warmth.

I won't give her real name, Susan will do. She was old enough to have children in college. She had a strong personality, didn't want help with most things that I was there to help her with. The cancer in her ovaries and the poisonous treatments left her skeleton-thin, feeble, shaky.

The Death Professional

I was assigned my first hospice patient about this time of year, green tulip shoots were trying to push through the last of the spring slush, the sun felt weak and gave little warmth.

I won't give her real name, Susan will do. She was old enough to have children in college. She had a strong personality, didn't want help with most things that I was there to help her with. The cancer in her ovaries and the poisonous treatments left her skeleton-thin, feeble, shaky.