Excerpts from the last 72 hours

My mother tells me the new lenses they put in her eyes have serial numbers.

Does that make me a cyborg? On CSI they always identify the dead bodies by the serial numbers on their breast implants.

The conversation always, always leads to a body.

***

In this house, there are coffee cups in the bathroom & the doors close for no reason. Spoons disappear from the kitchen and misplace themselves in laundry baskets or between the pages of cookbooks. They dive off their plates into the garbage & are buried beneath the browning lettuce & forgotten. The spoons always go missing. Sometimes this is permanent.

***

I am waiting in a paper gown & have lost count of time as the clocks do that slowed-down twist, each minute eternally taffy-stretched to its penultimate second. The supposed laws of physics break down in examination rooms, where the only way to mark time is to count the words the swim up out of the whispered conversations in the hallway--platelets, anemia, fungus. It takes at least eight symptoms for the doctor to arrive.

***

I seem to be the only person who does not see the logic of owning a gun.

***

I buy fanciful things at the market: black bread that nobody in the house will eat (except me), two bottles of rose, that desert mesquite honey that tastes so smoky & floral on a buttered biscuit, two bags of trail mix. I do not need these things; I need these things.

***

I sing Jimi Thing at the top of my lungs in the car because I am alone. When The Kid is here, we do a little Bohemian Rhapsody, a tone-deaf duet. We both have horrible voices & ridiculous hair.

***

Someone asks, "Are you working?"

I reply, "No. Just writing."

Later, I am embarrassed by this.