Mistake or Accident

Laurie Stone

I gave a man I loved a mug, a silk shirt, and a copy of Baudelaire. In time he became better at sex. After he left me, I saw him at a memorial service and wondered if he still had the shirt, the mug, the copy of Baudelaire. He was wearing a suit the color of a peach that was too tight for him and rode up his arms and legs. I kept looking away.

A cyclist took a spill off his bike in Bushwick. He sat on the curb, checking his palms for damage. A passerby offered him an Advil. He looked up and said, “Got a Xanax?”

The neighbor across from where we lived had a kind face and hard skin. I helped her plant bulbs around her small house. When I would see her, I would run to her, and she would pull me to her. We kneeled in the soil, planting gladiolus, tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils. There were dark grains on her leathery hands. We separated baby bulbs from mother bulbs, and I planted them at my house. My mother and the neighbor said hello. I don’t remember much more. My mother got dressed every day as if she had somewhere to go.

“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom,” wrote Hegel in 1805, in “Lectures on The Philosophy of History.” This brought to mind 1968, when I thought it would always be 1968.