All the Chinese Food in the World

I’m always sad when the gig ends. Three grueling weeks with a showroom crew I only see each spring and fall, preparing for the home textile market. I’ll especially miss the Flower Marys—a jubilant self-named group of gay men who fashion stunning floral arrangements. Peggy, Mary, Louise. Men whose real names I never learned or have long since forgotten. Over time, a musician among them will marry the showroom designer. Others vanish into illness, addiction. The displays shrink, the crew downsize with budget cuts. But this warm spring evening, in the early aughts, it’s all still in place, and I’ve got one night left in New York, where old friends, commercial photographers soon to be forced from the city by hostile buyout, have graciously lent me their tiny West Village apartment while they’re out of town.

Bags packed, rooms tidied, I’m caught in familiar disjunction between east and west coast. “Pick up,” I say, over-ordering Chinese from the place on Bethune, though it’s blocks away.

At Bleecker, a yellow cab slows; the driver stares rolling past. Exhaust trailed by a faint scent of honeysuckle. Violet dusk dissolves the thin wedge of playground ahead, memory slip-sliding into overlay as I cross the street—this neighborhood the stomping ground of my early adulthood. I was forged here, but it’s no longer my home.

[…continue reading “All the Chinese Food in the World” at Cleaver Magazine.]

Unwritten

Eighteen years old: I’m standing at the entrance to the newsroom at The Dallas Morning News. I’m wearing a white linen Ann Taylor suit and white stockings, bought special for this internship. For me, it’s a time during which I intend to come into the person I want to be: a hard-bitten reporter, albeit one with hot-rollered hair, because I’m a Texas gal. In my purse is a pack of cigarettes. It’s 1985. I love Madonna and Prince. This job is the bridge between the life I’ve been expected to lead and the life I have secretly always wanted for myself. This is my beginning.

[…continue reading “Unwritten” at JuxtaProse.]

An excerpt from “Holy Grounds ” by Avra Elliott (fiction ’15) published by Waxwing.

Holy Grounds

When Eddie’s sister Colleen first told him of Harold’s death, he’d pictured the old writer in a smoking jacket sitting in an overstuffed burgundy armchair, worn novel in his lap, a cigarette — or perhaps cigar — smoldering in a crystal ashtray beside him. As Harold drew his last breath, his soul, a grey version of his body if classic films were to be believed, would stand up and walk into the arms of one of Harold’s dark-haired damsels. That seemed the natural death of an aging, chain-smoking Western mystery writer. To hear a year after the fact that his friend had been killed by an insane man in a park, his face broken by a two-by-four, was to realize he’d been viewing life through a kaleidoscope. With the smallest shift what he knew to be a circle shrank into a dot and exploded into new patterns of nameless shapes and colors. Eddie began to suspect his favorite jacket had been stolen, not misplaced, and when Colleen said their father had sold the family home a few months before, she meant burned it to the ground.

[… continue reading “Holy Grounds” at Waxwing.]