A rubber mask. There in the window, a row of them. The Halloween store. I go inside. It smells like paint, rubber, plastic, glue in here. A paper top hat covered in gold glitter, a plastic scythe, red devil horns, bags of vampire fangs, a fake rat. I look for a Medusa mask. There it is. Just the same. There’s three of them, all on a steel hook. All off the same mold. I don’t want to touch them. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. I want to run out of here. I want to throw myself in front of a moving car. But not really. My hand reaches out and takes down a monkey mask. It’s a monkey, not a chimp. It’s not Curious George either. It’s a plain, general, no-name monkey, with a serious expression. I put it on. I don’t feel better. I feel different. I leave with it on. Maybe nobody noticed. I don’t care. I’m walking down the street, which I see framed through the slits under the staring, innocent eyes of the mask. I see the slanting gold of the sunbeams. I see the flowers bob in the breeze, planters full of them. People float past me like drowned bodies. The daytime has flooded the street. It sweeps everything before it, the waters of daytime pushing me along, pushing everyone, watering us with time, pressing on the gleaming glass windows, the glittering gems in the vitrines of the jewelry stores, the sparkling white tiles of an ice cream place, the hoods and windshields of the cars.

I don’t know anybody. I never will.

Milking

Milking

EVERY MORNING, LUCAS came downstairs, passed through the parlor and the kitchen, and entered the small room at the back of the house to find his glass of milk waiting for him in a saucer on the table, a gleaming white tube in the gloom back there, the sides of the glass peppered with droplets of gemlike condensation. The noise of the surf came in through the thin windowpanes, and, as Lucas took the cool glass in both hands and raised it carefully to his mouth, his father would come in behind him to watch him drink it, perhaps to make certain that he drank all of it. The chill bulk of the milk would shift swallow by swallow from the glass to his belly, vanish into him in a few moments, and he would return the glass, containing nothing now but a settling white film, solemnly to its saucer. Turning around, he would fully enter the benevolent presence of his father, who would settle his blessing hand carefully on the head of his son and smile, his brow contracted. Then mother would join them, taking away the glass and saucer, while father set breakfast on the table for them all.