Flanked between a friend and a lover, twelve rows back from the chuppah, I sense a hot itch run from the collar of my wool tux to my new black satin yarmulke. I tug at my shirt collar for relief. None comes. I decide my discomfort stems from more than just overactive steam radiators and tightly packed bodies. I feel searing eyes on me. Odds are good that nanas, aunts and nieces are whispering to their neighbors, “What is IT?”

Cursed page: white and neat, crisp, blank, correct in its angles, lines, corners. Now in march the letters, the black lines like so many dreams of loose eyebrows, eyelashes, stitches, black bobby pins – gross grotesque marks filling up a page.

Each night when the married man left and closed the door she counted off six minutes. Two minutes, she estimated, was enough time for him to descend the three flights from her apartment to street level. Two minutes gave him enough time to walk, often unsteadily, one hundred feet to the street corner. Two final minutes allowed for the car driver to hold the door open, adjust the air or heat, depending on the season, and drive away. Six minutes was enough time for him to melt into the comfortable folds of his own life.

I was having a staredown with the sun. As I lay on my back floating on the lake’s surface, the only way I could get a good look at the sun for more than a second was to plug my nose and slowly submerge while keeping my eyes open and trained on my opponent. The lake water was alternately ally and foe as it cooled and stung my eyes. My underwater vision gave the sun a dreamy quality encasing all sound in a liquid pillow cut only by the electric razor-like wheeze of a far away motorboat. When I felt my lungs aching, I told myself I was bored with the staredown and ceded the present battle, but not before vowing to give the sun a good looking-at one of these days.

Someone, somewhere would have fallen in love with this girl. She was just like her mother, and, well, someone had fallen well enough in love with her to produce this child. Joel choked when he walked by their room, from all the perfume. Between the two of them, he figured they must have bought all the scent on the Champs Elysee and with it every promise ever made by the commercial producers of stink. They carried themselves in a cloud of adjectives. Mysterious, seductive, exotic; fresh, playful, feminine; tantalizing, sexy. Surely they couldn’t smell it themselves, but Joel could more than smell it. He could taste it in the air, like the violet candy in gourmet groceries, precious tins that gathered dust.

The sidewalk scene was business as usual. Had anyone been there, though, to witness how playful the first rays streaking down 23rd street were, they would surely have believed heaven was mingling with this filthy spot of humanity. Such miracles occur routinely after all, we just fail to notice them. Imagine, if you will, the city steam climbing upward, and as if a switch was thrown, it turns from solemn gray into a brilliant white flame, its purity breaking the rich golden rods into a soft easy luminance or the roar of a bus accelerating to its next stop, an impatient car service blasting his horn, the ever present stench of urine. All of this had no effect on Leo; however, the sound of water near his head caused him to throw open his door to see the underbelly of a dog and a growing, steaming puddle. The walker at the other end of the leash hurriedly tugged and begged the poor beast, “come on.”

Ellis Johnson came to live with his daughter on account of burning his own house down. He had put a skillet of oil on for fiddlehead ferns and then had fallen asleep watching his favorite evangelist on the 24-hour preacher channel. The oil had become so hot that it ignited a roll of paper towels on the counter nearby -- at least that’s what the fire department said. All Ellis could remember was waking up to a house full of smoke. He also remembered how hot it had been and how he couldn’t find his way out.