Category: Yo Ivanhoe

Gogi? I remember saying. Is that your real name? She said something to me, something impertinent I’m sure, that was lost in the whirring of the blender. Grasshopper? she said a moment later, offering me a thick green drink in a jelly jar. I swear, I said, I could drink these all night. I do,…

Maybe you’ve seen my tongue limping in circles, yoked to the whip hand of my brain, sinking further and further into the muck. The words don’t come out the way they’re supposed to, or the way they used to. Something happens. Happened. It’s like when you take a picture and the print looks nothing like…

All summer I’ve had a retired shop teacher in my skull, trying to teach himself to play the marimba. I liked it better when he stuck with hammers and power tools. I know my tongue’s tucked away somewhere in my face, but I can’t feel the damn thing. The world outside my windows looks like…

This guy comes in and says to me, “What’s your goal here? What’s the big idea?” He was a huge man, seriously overweight and clearly laboring to balance there before me at the counter. Moist, wheezing, one of these characters who’s always swiping at his forehead with a handkerchief, and something of a throwback, I…

–Senior Citizen Center. Livingston, Montana Ella was on the front porch, blowing into an empty bottle with a straw, shivering a fly that was trapped there at the bottom. The fly was woozy and slick with cola, and was rolling and tumbling in the little bottle hurricane that Ella was producing with her straw. The…

I’m not kidding you, for about twenty seconds I thought I was looking at a giant snail, and I mean a really giant snail, just the soft, slimy part without the shell, maybe six feet tall and walking upright –or creeping– like a man. I saw the thing come slowly through the hedgerow at the…