

No Excuses.You showed me how to do my job and I just gave you a dirty look. Who the hell is this woman, I thought telling me what to do? Then you got promoted. Later you told me youd been a manager at another store for six years.No Excuses.
You asked,
would I pick up lunch if you gave me some money? And I realized it then,
if you asked,
Id have kissed your feet. You never asked,
because you wouldnt degrade me so and maybe because lunch gave you a stomachache.
The four of us would do a late dinner at a shitty restaurant &nb


MexicoIn movies and in books everyone always talks about their great plan to escape to Mexico. Rob a bank, or a liquor store, or, well its nothing to brag about but maybe an auto parts store near the border. Evade the authorities and its smooth sailing and endless piña coladas or whatever the hell they drink down here. Well in the movies and books Ive seen and read, they never show what its like when you get here.Mexico
Let me tell you. It smells like shit and blood and transmission fluid. There is a seemingly endless stretch of pot-hole ridden road behind and before me and nothing but hardpan on both sides. Some stun


telling a sad story backwards-17.telling a sad story backwards-
it smells like grief and sterilized metal.
i climb into andrews bed, though the nurses have strictly forbidden it. he closes his eyes and holds me tightly, because he says when he cant see me, it is easier to pretend i never happened to him.
15.
he pushes the cart aggressively down the aisle, pretending to mow over old ladies doing their sunday shopping.
"stop," i say giggling, lobbing a can of ravioli at him.
for a moment i think he simply didn't see me throw the can; it glances off his chest and falls to the floor, exploding in a pattern of


GodThere is a God. I have seen him snap the necks Of children and inspect their hollow remains. Pushing past the sinews, there is nothing there. No prayers clogging the arteries, stopping the rush Of blood, a blackened jet. Their mouths had not yet learnt how toGod
Form 'hail mary's'. Tongues twisted at the sound.
The syllables choke.
There is no use lying to a child who when asking For God, finds only silence.
He is not interested in them. The purity sickens. There's a boredom in innocence that causes him To turn away. His eyes are better fixed on


You've been on my mind...Quite frankly, you're heavy. Get off.You've been on my mind...


K Prabhu In 1988 I died. I was forty years old.K Prabhu
Remembering myself when I was forty
My friends were all forty too, more or less. Each one had a crisis, a goal, despair, families, something that defined them. I had none of those things and I did not want them either. This worried me a little. I had been a writer for some years. I wasnt sure if that defined me any longer. I realised I was conflictless. Perhaps it was a phase; perhaps it would change. But because I died, I never found out. When you die, you stay the same age. I