The alphabet is funny.
Punctuation marks?
They're funny too.
The word 'funny' is funny
and so is 'rain', 'Adam's apple', hair
dresser, and love.
Love is really funny,
as everyone knows.
Photo taken while waiting on line at TJ Maxx
Words are funny.
The alphabet is funny. Punctuation marks? They're funny too. The word 'funny' is funny and so is 'rain', 'Adam's apple', hair dresser, and love. Love is really funny, as everyone knows. Photo taken while waiting on line at TJ Maxx One of the most interesting things about fire eating is how there really are no tricks involved. It’s the most genuine kind of feat there is, if you think about it. Just spit in your mouth and the fire was real, not some crazy kind of cold fire that didn’t even exist no matter how many people guessed that was the trick. What I didn’t like was how one guy said to be a fire eater you had to get used to pain. That I didn’t like at all. Waffle and Vinny said they didn’t even see that part and when Frank tried to find the site where the guy said it again, he couldn’t. So we just figured whatever. If it was pain you could get used to how bad could it be?
Excerpt from Fire Eater, a story in progress We picked Vinny’s basement because it was unfinished, with Lally columns scattered where a kid could, and did, smack his face during freeze tag, blind chase, or for no reason. We just fell over sometimes. No idea why. I remember overhearing Mrs. Baxter, our teacher, say so to Mr. Evans, another teacher. Boys just fall over, she said. And they both laughed but not in a mean way.
Excerpt from Fire Eater, a story in progress Waffle, in case you were wondering, got his name because a couple fingers on his left hand looked like they got stuck in a waffle iron. Nobody knows, but he says he was born that way. When you say you were born that way explains a thing, and that’s that. The five of us had been friends since first grade, and we argued all the time, but not about why Waffle was Waffle. Some things just are and looking back, I can see that’s a good thing.
Excerpt from Fire Eater, a story in progress I have memories of writing poems as a teenager, and later – I even had one called, baldly, "Not to Know" – about the most painful scenarios I could imagine: Romeo and Juliet dying of misinformation; ditto Othello; The Wild Duck sacrificed in error; moments of my own life in which either I or someone else did not know something crucial. Such accidental ignorance has always been the worst catastrophe I could think of.
Rosellen Brown, It Is You the Fable Is About, in Mirror, Mirror On The Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer |
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