J. Lennon - See You in Paradise

SHOULDER PADS her mother tore from an otherwise stylish dress, recovered from the garbage and employed to fill out her bra while she dances to pop music in front of the mirror

A TWENTY-FOOT LENGTH OF CEMENT PIPE, ten feet in diameter, abandoned in a farm field, which the farmer has plowed around and which will barely be visible, months later, above the rustling cornstalks

YOUR TONGUE, forming forbidden words inside your closed mouth

A SET OF JUNIOR BARBELLS, the plastic weights grown brittle and split along the seams so that sand has spilled out, which he cannot bring himself to discard, even though they remind him, every time he works out on his state-of-the-art cable-based bodybuilding system, of a time when he was weak and at the mercy of his father, who was the one who bought him the junior barbells in the first place, and against whom he mercilessly retaliated as soon as he was strong enough to do so, a retaliation that his father, lying prostrate on the shag rug with his face bent and bloodied, seemed, with a wry, knowing, split-lipped smile, to tacitly approve of and even take proud responsibility for

TRIPLE-WASHED MIXED GREENS in a plastic bag, on a shelf beside others like it

GRIT found encrusted in the tire wells of the suspect’s car that, after extensive testing in a forensic geology laboratory, proves to have come from a beach in Oregon the suspect claims never to have visited

THE FATHER’S BELT, which the mother matches, as the child sleeps, to the scars on the child’s back, scars the child insisted came from falling against a schoolyard fence during a “shirts vs. skins” game of kickball

A BISCUIT crushed into the slush of a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot

THE ORANGE TOBOGGAN whisking her to her death

THE CASSETTE TAPE that happened to be in the tape deck when it was stolen from a car and was still lodged there when you bought the stolen deck for thirty bucks from a collapsible buffet table set up on the sidewalk outside your office building, and which contained, as you learned the moment you installed the deck and turned it on, a desperate recorded plea for reconciliation from a weeping woman to the lover who spurned her, which fills you with both pity and delight to hear, pity because of her plaintive voice and the blurred, haunted quality of the recording, delight because the offending lover’s tape deck has been stolen

A BUMPER STICKER, affixed to the inside of a women’s room stall door, bearing the name and telephone number of a rape crisis center that has lost its funding and is no longer operating

THE PASSPORT PHOTOS on which your eyes are obscured by little white bars

THE TUBE OF UNGUENT tightly rolled at the empty end, which she is just about to realize has been leaking all over the contents of her purse for days

THE TEST RESULTS from the genetics lab that his hands are shaking too hard to open

SPIDERWEBS that connect her bicycle to the cellar wall, which are severed when, some months after her death, he fills the tires with air, straps on her helmet, which is too small for him, climbs onto the bicycle, and rides as fast as he can through the darkened streets of their town, screaming her name at the top of his lungs, until at last he is arrested for disturbing the peace and spends the night in jail, which he later realizes is exactly the place he wanted to be that night, which is perhaps the reason that he elected to ride, while screaming, the bicycle, which he leaves behind at the police station and never sees again

THE QUILTED GRAY METALLIC-NYLON VEST that the Korean exchange student lost outside the Christian Center, on the back of which is printed an incomprehensible English phrase

THE NEW MAP on which his hometown is not marked, as it no longer exists, because the state forced its residents to sell their homes so that the new reservoir could be created above them, which reservoir, with its waterfront casinos, has greatly increased the value of the surrounding properties, many of which are owned by the senator who lobbied to have the reservoir project approved

A BOTTLE OF PAIN RELIEVER brought on a business trip that proves, at the moment it is most needed, to be filled not with pain reliever but with buttons

THE HOUSEPLANT that will not die

FIFTY PAIRS OF OLD BLUE JEANS found at secondhand clothing stores and brought, at great expense, on a trip to eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics, where, rumor had it, old blue jeans could be sold for a lot of money, but where this was no longer true, as so many previous visitors had heard the same rumor and done the same thing, creating a glut of old blue jeans, which were not even all that stylish there anymore, and causing the entire trip to be ruined by the necessity of hauling around these huge suitcases full of other people’s jeans, which smelled kind of bad, as if those other people were currently wearing them

ACRID MIST that, not long after a crash is heard from the chemistry storeroom, begins to seep out from the under the closed door

WORK GLOVES, once owned by the farmer, routinely used for calving and for the slaughter of cattle, and hardened with blood and slime into the exact shape of his hands, that are many years after his death discovered hanging in the barn by the farmer’s son, who tries them on and finds that his own hands, though soft from his life of relative affluence and leisure and work behind a desk, fit perfectly

THE PHOTOGRAPH of the woman and her children and the children’s father that the father has been cut out of, which the woman uses to mark her place in Valley of the Dolls when she goes to the window to see what is the matter