January 2025 – Sebastian Malloy

2025 January

Panic Buying

My phone buzzes with a call while Hunter and I are in Grossett’s General Store, grabbing cheese sticks and pizza slices. I pull it out of my pocket and see that it’s Tina, in another time zone from us, three hours behind. “Hey,” I say, answering the call. “How’s tricks on the left coast?” “Tricks are pretty good,” she says. “Our offer on the house was accepted, so it’s just getting paperwork signed now, in blood most likely.” “Holy shit.” I turn the phone away from my mouth and say to Hunter, “They got the house.” “Nice!” Hunter says. “Tell…

Cinnamon

There is a letter from Viola in the mailbox this morning, amongst the junk and the bills. It is too cold outside to read it at the top of the driveway, so I wait until I am settled in near the pellet stove. Dear Sebastian, I picked up Boone and the bunch at the airport, and did you break them? They won’t stop talking about ice and snow and temperatures low enough to shatter teeth and bone. What arctic hell are you living in? Don’t answer, it’s rhetorical. I am including a few poems for you in the bottom of…

New Year’s Resolutions

“I should have learned how to ice skate at some point,” Rivi says. “I’m sure I would have been a graceful gazelle on them.” “Plenty of ice gazelles in Maine,” I say. “You have to watch out for them when you’re driving at night. Totally wreck your car if you hit one.” We are standing out on the ice of a pond near the house where Hunter and I live, watching some people in the distance ice fishing. The pond is big, what I would have called a lake in the days before I moved here, when I didn’t know…

Black-Eyed Peas

“Happy New Year,” Viola says from the other end of the phone line. “I thought about calling you at midnight, but I figured you’d be asleep.” “Midnight my time, or yours?” I ask. Viola is in San Francisco, on the other side of the country from me. “Oh, mine, definitely.” “Yeah, my ringer is definitely off at three in the morning.” “I figured,” she says. “Thought that as long as I got you on the first day of the year, that was an acceptable alternative.” “Well, I appreciate the call either way,” I say. “It’s the least I could do,…