The Penn Review

My dog has a deformed rib, the vet says, it doesn’t hurt her. Maybe she bumped into a coffee table when she was two weeks, or played too rough with a brother. She’ll be fine. The vet continues her exam, pulling back gums, good teeth, good dog.

I’ve been eating a bag of clementines a day. I googled “how many oranges do you have to eat a day before it kills you?” feeling ambivalent about the answer. One of the things worth living for is eating a bag of clementines a day. I leave a fine spray of sticky juice across my computer screen. My nails and fingertips are turning that sickly nicotine yellow that boys love to write about but this time it’s not cigarettes, it’s eating a bag of clementines a day.

In fourth-grade band I played the trumpet mainly because my father had a trumpet and so I had a trumpet, not knowing that convenience and great art seldom go together, what I wanted, deeply wanted, was to play the drums, but those who were going to play had to go into another room, and that was too much for me, shyness matched my desire, so I was a trumpet player for six middling years, never excelling, always watching the drums and those who played them

When I write, the world around me stops, and the gears in my head turn at a million miles per second. I write until I can’t write anymore, until the page is bursting with so many words and letters and syllables that if I were to fit one more period onto the end of a sentence the entire page might just burst and send missiles of consonants and vowels flying through the air, right back to where they came from. I have to choose what I put down on the page carefully, how the words roll off the tongue, how they mesh with their environment to create cohesive thoughts and sentences that drive forward the story towards its grand or garish denouement. The decision between brief and attaché or serene and halcyon lies only in the moment. I can always go back and edit and tweak what I have written, but it’s those first words that lick the paper that truly determine the story’s ultimate fate.