Literary Orphans

May Translates December by Maria Pinto

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“Jesus, did you ask if you could use that old Ajax to clean the bathroom?”=

My father gave me that very can when I bought this house, 12 years ago. He was about to begin his permanent stay in the cancer ward, but still took time to tell me which chemicals worked best on which surface. His ghost is elusive. As a lapsed Catholic, I take my invisible guardians wherever I can get them, even if that means they must emanate from old cans of abrasive cleaner.

“All music from the 90s sucks.”=

I stopped understanding young people years ago. Now my high school classmates are dying. Gray-haired codgers calling themselves The Replacements limp onstage to butcher the songs I loved, and you just have no idea how futuristic we all were.

“Maybe you could go off the pill.”=

What, without children, is my stake in the future?

“That’s not the shirt I’d pick for you.”=

You carry off that shirt from Target’s “Juniors” section so well it makes me feel like I’ve become the uncle we steered our girlfriends away from at family gatherings.

“I love you.”=

I trust you to be at my side when I die.

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Maria Pinto‘s work has appeared or will appear in Bartleby Snopes, Spirited Magazine, The Drunken Boat, The Missing Slate, 101Words, Broad!, Riot of Perfume, and elsewhere. She was the 2009-2010 Ivan Gold Fellow at The Writers’ Room of Boston, in the city where she lives and works. Her debut novel is currently in search of a home. She is hard at work on her second.

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–Art by Milan Vopálenský & Esmahan Özkan

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