THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

  The Caretakers by David Steven Simon Children are the caretakers of stars that can’t remember how or when they fell. It may have been a Tuesday. It happened so fast. One minute they were defying gravity, basking in the womb of time— and then, before they could wail in unfathomable sorrow, they tumbled and flailed and landed on the beach, like the twisted ragdoll bodies of Normandy, until the Caretakers arrived, carrying them off in low-swaying buckets to their work station beneath a striped umbrella planted like an astronaut’s flag, lit by the surgical luminaire of the soon-to-be-forgotten moon, where the Caretakers began their tireless work on the resurrection of the Fallen. Points were readjusted. Spines realigned. Compasses rejiggered— guaranteeing no star would ever wander off alone again. The work ended at early bright, with a final kiss that triggered a thermonuclear reaction in even the coldest of heavenly bodies— whic...

    My mom was a  clever girl with a tortured soul which she wore like a winter coat buttoned  to the neck to keep out the marrow chilled wind  even on the 4th of July. Her life was  rearranged  by tragedy when on a post bubble bath Brooklyn night in 1931 instead of following instructions  to keep a big sister eye on her forever scurrying  baby brother the tow-haired Harry,  she succumbed to the  hypnotic pull of motherhood  and tended to her doll with its go-to-sleep eyes and double- ruffled ribbon-tied  organdy bonnet, as Baby Harry in an effort to kiss the cheek of the beckoning moon secretly made his way to the launching pad of the window seat pressed his lips against the mesh of the screen and fell to his concrete death  while Wayne King and His Orchestra  played Goodnight Sweetheart on the Philco Highboy From that moment on my mom believed that  the family had secretly convened and convicted her of mur...