unaveragejo3

The children misheard you. They broke open the jar looking for petals and found only flours. The dust is everywhere, settling everywhere, on the refrigerator and the stove, on the startled mother cat yowling her pawprints through the snowy floor, on her sharp-eared kittens prancing in the clouds. The three-year old is screaming. He has cut his finger on the glass, there are red streaks in the snow, and his white-faced brother stares up at you with a look commonly reserved for the confused and the betrayed.

I hate playing with dinosaurs.  Common sense would dictate that they would be excellent poker players, as they are incapable of facial expression.  I've deduced that when they lunge at you and eat your face, they're displeased, but I don't know if you could call that a facial expression per se.  It's like Wild West movies where everybody pulls out a six-shooter, except instead of a gun, it's a dinosaur, and instead of being shot, your face gets eaten.  However, I digress.  My original point was that dinosaurs should be good at poker, and yet this is simply not the case.  Take, for example, a game I held earlier this very evening. We had jus

   I met one of those Beat poets once. He said his name was Erik and I told him that my name was Eva, and after that, names didn't really seem to matter anymore. We became the type of people who were together whenever we needed each other.    Magic can happen at any time of day, week, month, year, but our type of magic always seemed to occur by night. Dancing on a bridge, under the spotlight of a street lamp, in the middle of the highway. We would sort of just groove on those neatly painted white lines on the asphalt. We'd weave in and out of them, spinning, leaping, rocking. True artists, great artists, we'd t

Unfortunate Thing Here is the tale of Unfortunate Thing Whom I found in our garden shed He’s seven foot two, with shiny black nose And horns on the top of his head Unfortunate Thing wore a fine suit of scales Which hadn’t been polished for years All covered in dust and speckles of rust From endless showers of tears Reclined on a large sack of compost A vision of gloom and despair Alone in the shadows, sat sobbing Needing some comfort and care “Poor Thing” said I, “What’s the problem – whatever is troubling you?” And proceeded to give him a cuddle (….which proved quite a hard thing t

Happy Birthday Lizzie woke up at dawn.  She was too excited to sleep.  Normally Saturdays were her sleep in day, but today was special.  Today was her mommy’s birthday.  Her daddy was going to be so proud of her as he didn’t have to tell her to wake up, to not sleep the day away.  Today she was a big girl, able to do for herself.  She was now 8 years old, no longer a baby, daddy told her so.  With that in mind, she was going to dress herself and do her own hair.  Even though Lizzie had not seen her mommy in a long time, she could still remember how beautiful she was.  She remembered how her mommy smelled, always of vanilla.  

When I was nine and my brother was seven, our dad and his girlfriend took us to the fairground. I had only met dad’s girlfriend a few times before. Her name was Ursula, and I wished she did look like Ursula the sea witch. Really, she looked as though she had stepped right out of a magazine. When Ursula saw us, her red lips stretched really wide to show her perfect white teeth, but her eyes didn’t smile. My brother didn’t seem to notice. He chatted away to both of them about his favourite rides, but I didn't want to look up at her face after that. When my dad went to get change from a machine, I sat next to Ursula on the ben