Two-Player Games

Night-fuddled, seeking asylum, now that God’s teeth seem to grit each time he ponders you. Interstate in earshot of the old bank-barn, the pigswill, stray torpid swine sampling the late field-rot. You list, then right yourself like a fast-sobering drunk in the dank rain-fields. Already October under wing, south-wooed doves and red-winged blackbirds. Wood-smoke in the crags and clefts of hills out where the tar-shacked hermit lives. You hear him mornings on the slant road, wake to his gravelly slog. Once, you paid him to prune the wide-draped alder away from the house, to grease the whiny weather-cock. Later—a dream?—you invited him in, hauled out all of your two-player games. Taught him what you could of Oklahoma gin, the vast intricacies of thumb warring, rock-paper-scissors, how to properly stalk a king.

Book People

Let’s be clear: not any cleverer than the rest. And they can be so bound up in a story’s elaborate love knots that little by little they misremember how desire in the real world, lacking a Florentine backdrop, say, might easily prosper—how a piazza factors less in amorous schemes than pizza ever did. Kinked necks, hands steeped in the fusty-paged tang of shelf-years, eyes trimmed in dollar-store cheaters. Good-for-nothing sorts when the rain is steady and the lamplight near. The rest of us moseyed off, taking our beautiful inside noises to other rooms, keeping a distance that loving them entails.