--YOU ALREADY KNOW EVERYTHING THAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN, DON'T YOU?

…Happy Monday.

I hope the start of your week is fantastic.
It’s raining like a mother where I am.

…Already this morning I read four poems and three stories for my editing gig at Metazen.  They were not so good.  One was close.  That makes over 20+ straight rejections.  I’d really like to find a great piece.  I’d like to accept something.  I’d like to make a writer happy, because I know how that feels.

…Here are some things of interest:

--“The most wasted day is that in which we have not laughed.” Sebastian Chamfort

--"It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window." Wallace Stevens

--"How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye."
- Jane Kenyon, "Having it Out with Melancholy"

--"Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking  rules, making mistakes, and having fun." Mary Lou Cook

--“We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.” Anonymous

--“People rarely succeed at anything unless they have fun doing it.” Anonymous

--“One person with courage makes a majority.” Andrew Jackson

…And lastly, I had this story, “Sons” up at A Baker’s Dozen:

http://13extraordinarythings.com/issue-four/

 

            Sons

 

            My sister’s young son stares at me, one eye slitted.  He holds the gaze for a full minute until I look away.

            Later, when I tell her the boy doesn’t like me, she says, “It’s not you.  He just doesn’t care for men in general.”

            At Thanksgiving, while I’m peeling a bottle of wine open, he slugs me in the spine and runs.

            On Christmas, he steals my new carving knife, but I corner him in the garage.

            “Give it back.”

            He glares.

            “I mean it.  Give it, now.”

            He whips the blade out of his boot like a rabid swashbuckler and slashes the air between us.  Once it comes within an inch of my chin.

            **

            When my sister brings her son with her one night, she stands at the doorway, rain-soaked and says, “I’m sorry.  I don’t know where else to go.”  She tells me she’s scared.

            Her face is a wreck, mostly the eye areas which are split at the brow, eggplant-colored, swollen like socks.

            She says, “Don’t,” as I try to push past through the door.  She grabs my wrist.  “Please,” she says.  “I just have to think.”

            In the middle of the night her son finds me in the kitchen.  He hangs by the door frame.

            “Here,” I say.  “Come have a seat.”

            His eyes see the Seagram’s bottle, my glass and smoldering cigarette.

            “You’re all the same,” he says.

            **

            Next Thanksgiving and Christmas my sister and her son are not there.  They’ve moved to Michigan or Baltimore or Dallas.  Moving, my sister is, on the run with her boy, raising him to be a man.