Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

I was standing at the counter of my local record store, basically monopolizing the entire table as well as the attention of my favorite salesperson. He is my peer and has manned the counter for as long as I have been shopping there, so we practically have the same profession. He also has the whole High Fidelity-Rob Gordon-Championship Vinyl Owner -vibe about him, without the superiority complex or the raging fits, that I know of, and since Nick Hornby’s modern classic is one of my favorite books, I always look for signs that the story in the book is all true, and therefore notice such things. I had come down to check out birthday gift possibilities for my girl Roberts, and let’s face it, when at a record store, you don’t just get the one record and leave. So, the man was doing his best to help me out. “So, I mean what do you have in CD format?” “Oh, I have a bunch of stuff here, in the Used section. Let’s see now.” I waited, all my stuff spread across the counter, whi...

Before having Rocketman recommended to me by a workmate who had seen it at a screening for the press and loved it dearly and told me she thought I would, too, I mostly associated Elton John with my sister. When I was little, she would make these mixtapes for me from whatever songs were big hits just then mixed with some classics, using special Japanese cassette tapes, pink and transparent and adorable. I would examine the hand-written song lists carefully in my Lanzarote novelty fringe top, wearing my neon-colored shades bought from the only punk shop in town, while listening to the tapes over and over in my silver boombox. I knew Crocodile Rock like the back of my hand, because it was on one of those tapes, a special Summer Mix tape. I remember staying at my sister’s place and listening to her vinyl copy of Elton John’s Greatest Hits, the blue-tinted album with the man in his Sacrifice look on the cover I think every teenager and young adult back then had in their collection. I k...

Mirabelle felt her head expand with air, as the laughter, the hysterics, made way to deep embarrassment that was not without a spiteful undertone. She hadn’t been guilty of stealing Miriam’s precious necklace, no, Mamie had lost the heavy silver and green thing all by herself in a drunken stupor on the night of her big opening. But the waiter had given it to Miri, saying he seemed to remember the beautiful woman in their group wearing it when they were last there, as if Mirabelle did not fit into that category and wasn’t beautiful at all, and that comment, somehow, paired with Mamie’s rude commentary on the blue collar workers and never ever wanting to sink so low as to have a job as a waitress, in total disregard of Miri belonging to that exact class and in fact doing exactly that for a living, despite her writing habit, oh, Mamie made her feel like a rank dilettante, a half-assed amateur, an embarrassing country sibling not to be taken seriously at all, and all that eye-rolling to ...

Lemon-scented, flippant, smiling woman but with a smile that is neither knowing nor interested, only kind. A tired smile. But she knows what it means, even the aloofness, which isn’t about her, but about the fact the she finds everything around her amusing, and because she is with her friend, there is a safety there from whence the flippancy can roam uninterrupted, for the delight of them both. The cake-eating girls on a summer’s day, the sensuousness of eating together after such a long time, I know it is so good I may faint, or come, or both. Summer dresses wasn’t it what the writer said anyway, the girls, and it isn’t over yet, the hot and mighty summer, although it may be a bit sad, too. They were playing Art Tatum and Ben Webster and Florence’s new album and imagining things that were long ago, like the white sheet being lifted from the line by the autumnal gale, the white sheet a phantom rushing by their second-story window with the perpetual bird shit. Oh god I...