nonfiction by Abby Frucht
Sunday mornings, before turning on This Week, we like to see who’s savvier, Chuck or me.
“New Arizona Immigration Law,” I wager.
“Goldman Sachs,” Chuck counters, both of us equally right as wrong, since the TV show features both topics today, making each of us smarter than the other, thus also dumber. Some weeks we turn the channel to hip-hop for love-making, but this week, when it’s all he can do to lay eyes on me, we lie discussing not derivatives, since we’re too dumb to understand that part of the show, but the immigration law, which we’re too smart not to find too complicated to ever be resolved in our contentious fashion. But if a person wants to live here, here where every story has at least two sides, or is, like human bodies— breasts, for instance— bi-lateral, then who are we to disappoint them? I tell Chuck my dream about the three day-laborers lunching at midnight in our backyard under the spotlight we installed to see owls by, the three buff young Latinos naked but for blue jeans, not caring I could see even their nipples from inside my kitchen while clutching the heart-shaped pillow the hospital gave me for propping and security. Despite the threat the three men posed, or maybe because of it, I thought of asking them in for a seat on the couch instead of there on prickly grass. Chivalrously they returned my contemplation, frankly assessing my terror of them.
