Hi everyone -- one more day until the dreaded tax day. Thanks so much for reading the excerpts. Very soon the whole revised project will be done. My dearest Jodi will be the first to know, then all of you!
David moved in August to start the school year while I awaited my defense in October. My graduate hours completed, I could no longer teach which was a relief. Instead I worked twenty hours a week in the graduate studies office, and I worked part-time for Angela as an office assistant at the university in the computer science department where everyone had advice about my predicament.
“There’s loads of inappropriate middle-aged men here,” one adjunct in the department said. “You don’t need to drag your shit halfway across the country.”
“I think people have a betting pool,” Angela said. “Kind of like football season.”
The soundtrack to these lonely days was the Clash’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” Hank hummed a darker song, Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust.” We went out to dinner a couple nights a week, grim slogs through formerly happy haunts that seemed to say, Nevermore, like Poe’s “Raven” gone awry. Even the reliable Chinese buffet that had charmed us in our undergraduate days with its cheap prices and loads of MSG had lost its luster. I pushed around chunks of sesame chicken and tried to make conversation. Hank couldn’t read the small writing on his fortunes so he always handed them to me without a word. Years ago, he got one that said, She loves you as much as she can, she just can’t love you very much. Hank laughed and attributed the sentiment to Erin, whom had left town for London and who had only sent one letter to me, imploring me in the postscript to love her as much as she loved me. I didn’t know what she meant, and I didn’t want to know.
Michelle's Spell of the Day
"It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It's awfully difficult." Edith 'Little Edie' Bouvier Beale
Cocktail Hour
It's Restaurant Week in Detroit!
Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Wednesday!
"Love me as much as I love you" seems like a pretty clear manipulation, I should think.
ReplyDeleteGreat excerpt as usual, and you chose just the right place to break it.
He chased a high school genius to college. In one of his poems, she might've been gay.--A. Tennyson
ReplyDeleteIt's always fascinated me as to how one "defends" a collection of short stories as one's doctoral dissertation. After all, what is the thesis?--The Explicator
ReplyDeleteThey give doctorates for short stories? Where do I sign up?--Phoenix Capella
ReplyDeleteMichelle's dissertation, "Ten Original Short Stories" is published by the University of North Texas and is available from UMI in Ann Arbor.--Library Services
ReplyDeleteArt follows life!--Wilde Oscar
ReplyDeleteLife follows art!--Oscar Wilde
ReplyDeleteLike a bridge over troubled waters!--Art Garfunkle
ReplyDeleteI will lay me down!--P.S.
ReplyDeleteI'm a writer. I just follow where the words lead me.--MB
ReplyDeleteNot to mention Don Key!
ReplyDelete--Woody
ReplyDeleteIf it was the divorce that brought you to Detroit then I can't really think of anything ugly about that divorce.
ReplyDeleteI hate tax time even though we got some back this year!
Michelle, I loved the quote and the movie about the Edie's! Need to see the Documentary on it, now. I feel like that some days--you know what I mean! x
ReplyDelete