drafted in OLLIE, OLLIE

There were no bodies in the street to navigate but that of your dog, your sandy retriever, and there across the lawn last mowed by my father my mother was bent across the balustrade, dad below her, their eyes locked eternally.

Art

This short story, "Art," is a blending of a couple perceptions. The first came from watching a pair of young artists conceptualize a show they were holding in an upscale lounge in Milwaukee. They were popular guys, and their trendy events were well received in the hip, smart community. They volleyed lame ideas over cans of Schlitz, and their artist lives seemed very satisfying to them, even if their ideas were just okay -- or in this instance, bad. Despite any mockish self-validation I perceived, however, they were serious guys, talented and hardworking. Most importantly, they were genuinely interested in art, and willing to make themselves vulnerable to it, even if during the conversation they made a defense of silly pretentiousness.

The second inspiration (as will be clear) was Dan Steinhilber's installation piece at the Baltimore Museum of Art's "Front Room" series, which consisted of packing peanuts being pushed around a room by some household devices like vacuum cleaners. Of course, this is just the kind of show that can be really irritating to people who lack a conceptual framework for it, but all the same it can be a moving piece for anyone, regardless of their critical vocabulary. Even though his girlfriend pokes fun at the highfalutin museum curator when she jokes, "Lay meaning before me," the artist insists that he has, in fact, affected her in a way that the piece was intended to work.

Hopefully I'm right that providing this background will enhance reading "Art." If you ask me, I've included enough to make it more compelling, but left plenty of angles to find more (and more interesting) nuggets.

Lady At Lunch

Each night after cleaning her dinner dishes, she prepares lunch for the following day. Again she pulls out the head of lettuce, the remainder of the tomato, and a celery stalk. She chops all of this into a salad container with a lid, then takes from the freezer a box of vegetarian sandwich patties. She removes one and places the box back into the freezer with the single patty resting on top. She does the same thing with a package of individually wrapped cheese in the fridge. If you prepare to oversleep, is it still oversleeping? In the morning she scoops all of this into a grocery bag and dashes to the bus stop.

All of which is to say: at lunch she forks through her salad and removes every chunk of tomato onto a napkin which she discards in the trash. It gets picked up in the afternoon by a trashman who heaves the bag into a dumpster, which is hauled away to a landfill outside her town. There, the tomatoes rot into the soil and a single flower with white petals rises up above the waste and leans into the wind.

She reads a book called The Clan of the Cavebear over and over again, I note as I lean over my note to slurp down a plastic spoonful of canned soup.