Ramshackle Review

Kio Stark:
Selections from Municipal Archive 

on the block

“Hey Stranger,” is what my neighbor, the ex-fireman, calls out when I walk by, but it’s been years since we were strangers. I know about the fall that busted his leg, and the pins in his knee that need replacing. I know where he grew up, and that his brother lives across the river. I’ve admired the hot red Lincoln that he stores for the winter and I helped him out of his plain black sedan once, when his knee was in pain. I know he ran track in high school, cross-country. He chides me on warm days when he doesn’t see me in running clothes, and he cautions me to stretch when I arrive home in a sweat.

I told him today that I’m moving. Not far, still in the neighborhood, he said. He shook my hand after all these years and said, “good luck to you.”

“I’ll walk by and see you sometimes,” I told him. It’s something you say to someone you might easily never see again, and I’m not even sure which house is his if I wanted to ring the bell. This is street intimacy, that’s all, I realized, and in a single handshake, I saw the boundaries crystallize. They are tricky, transparent. Like glass, they are solid all the same.

in a cab

On the radio, there’s some talk show banter going on. A new study says men who kiss their wives every morning live five years longer than the ones who don’t.

The driver says to me, “I’d kiss my wife every morning if she’d let me!” He’s got a sweet laugh. A small guy, bundled against the cold. He touches his chin. “In fact this morning I told her this was her last chance to kiss my smooth cheek until summer. I’m gonna grow a beard to keep warm. Never had a beard before but I gotta do something, I freeze in these cars.”

“Did she kiss you?”

“Yeah, she’s a good girl, my wife. We couldn’t be more different. She reads books all the time, I don’t touch the stuff. I never even went to high school, but somehow we get along real good.”

We’re driving along the river, the traffic is slow. I’m watching his pitted face, his shy smile. “I met her in the car. A customer. I picked her up by the hospital and we talked so much I forgot where I was supposed to be driving her! She said that was alright. We had breakfast the next couple mornings and then she moved in. Eight years.”

He’s on a roll now, and I’ve no inclination to stop him. He’s telling the kind of stories I always think the cabbies might be making up. The kind that are a little too cute. But I believe him.

“I grew up over there,” he says, pointing across the river to a row of project towers. “I started dealing drugs when I was 12. I tell you, drugs gave me a good life. I had money, I went all over the world. I went places I don’t remember going but people tell me I was there.”

“Then I had to get cleaned up. My clock ran down. So here I am. I’m doing ok. I work, people work.”

This looks bitter on the page but he’s not. He is laughing his sweet laugh. He is, I find out later, dying slowly of the things you would expect. His liver, he says, but not his heart.

at the cafe

The blind man and his bull dyke guide are back today. He follows her, half a step behind, his hand resting on her shoulder. He moves timidly, tapping his cane in an arc in front of him, his ears attuned to her whispered translations of what it is like to see this room, these obstacles. But when she moves his hand to the back of the chair, the scene changes key. He straightens up and casts a great smile up at the sky. I wish you could see him. He’s wearing slick wraparound glasses and a shiny red jacket. He looks more like a space man than a blind man. He’s got his knuckles on the table, keeping time, he nods along as the woman talks. She’s speaking ardently. You know, with her hands.

on the subway platform

I only realize I’m late when I notice that the woman with Medusa’s curls isn’t here. People as units of measure. The clock of the world.

on the subway

It’s a Fellini movie in here, jammed with people who look like out-of-work carnies grown old. That fat Russian man with the thick neck, he’s the strong man. I see the flowing orangey locks of a lion tamer, he’s reading the newspaper. There’s a stout woman with the sparkly makeup of the trapeze flyer, but she’s not swirling around the pole. A man whose nose would need little addition to play the clown leans against the door. One woman has a palsied face, her lips and eyes outlined in black, a bearded lady once, certainly. Sitting across from me is a tall dark man, his shaking hands holding a barker’s top hat in his lap. I know I’m staring at them. I am filled with wonder that might easily pass for rudeness. The train grinds into the station and the bearded lady gets up to leave. She leans down as she passes me and touches my face. “We were all beautiful once,” she says.

Kio Stark's first novel, Follow Me Down, will be out in June 2011 from Red Lemonade. She blogs at www.municipalarchive.com and www.fencedlot.com, and teaches geeks about ideas at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.  Learn more about Kio’s work and the courses she teaches at NYU’s ITP.