Lance Olsen - Calendar of Regrets

the second a global positioning system for a heart he knows exactly where he is at all times it doesn't help no one else shares his sense of place

that night he is found by sharks

the third is born with an iPod for lungs a Bose speaker for a mouth she sings on and on her poignant voice keeping her company calming her giving her a reason to hold out another thirty seconds another thirty seconds but on the seventh day

on the seventh day she ends up drowning in a foamy white agitation

The Notebook Boy showing these snippets to his mother

when she dropped in on him unexpectedly one afternoon to let him know his weeping father had finally left her

he now the size of a bright green South American tree frog

the father

unable even to reach the doorknob to exit her life without her assistance

it's for the best sweetheart , she telling The Notebook Boy everything always happening for a

wiping her nose with the white rose of a Kleenex

huddling in the large stuffed chair with the diamond-tufted pillow in front of the TV

reading passages he had given her

these are heartbreaking she announcing when finished

others should have their hearts broken by them too

carrying her son directly to the corner Kinko's to copy him flying to Manhattan and demanding of the startled woman editor stepping from the lavatory that she that she read what the mother was

was thrusting in her direction

that summer The Notebook Boy published to rave reviews

famous overnight

as they say

incessantly

he refusing to read aloud on book tours having never learned how refusing to sign any of the shiny red and yellow

hardback copies of himself

his mother beginning to shrink as well

she propped him against the back of a plush chair at the front of auditoriums of libraries bookstores he stared mutely out at the audience with those sad blue eyes of his and then wordless his mother picked him up carefully tucked him under her arm departed

a cult developing around him

The Notebook Boy appearing mute on popular talk shows

his image adorning the covers of glossy magazines

B-flat or G-sharp. For argument's sake, you understand. Everything became a verb, became a story, you see, and the verbs hurried me away from the boom-boom. This happened, in short, in a phrase, and then something else happened. Here, it could be said to go without comment, we are splitting hairs. Wonderful turn of— Splitting. Imagine. And still… Or, to be more precise, some things happened, of course, and some things did not, again and again. Consequently, one could hazard without fear of reprisal a guess that some things happened among many things not happening. Unless, of course, et cetera. There's always that. Stranger things have— But there it is. Because the swallows. The clouds. The photographs, arresting. Because— Hello. It's lovely to make your acquaintance. The sound— The sound, I should emphasize, perhaps, for a sense of narrative immediacy, was a moist one. The gutting of a fish, let us say, and no more. My wing tearing. My wing being torn. Because the answer is… the answer is— But why?