Rivi – Sebastian Malloy

Archive by category "Rivi"

Timothy Hutton Popsicles

What’s the temperature, Kenneth? Rivi texts me. 12 degrees right now, I text back. With a wind chill of -11. Her typing indicator winks an ellipses at me for what feels like thirty seconds, then pauses, then goes again for another thirty. Finally, her message pops up on the screen: Fuck. Still looking forward to moving? I ask. I am going to die, she says. You won’t die. You’ll just have to get a good jacket. And gloves. And a hat. And a scarf. And long underwear. I’ll be dead and frozen in a block of ice like Encino Man. Jesus, Rivi.…

Perpetual Drama Machine

“The power’s out,” Rivi says, on the other end of the phone line. “My madness is beginning to set in.” “Your madness set in years ago,” I say. “That ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, sunk, and was swallowed by a sea monster way before today.” “Don’t make fun of me,” she says. “I’m a delicate flower right now.” “I apologize. Sincerely. With much sorriness. So much of it. Maybe you should call the electric company while your phone still has a charge, instead of wasting it talking to me.” “You’re the one who lives in the woods, Sebastian,” Rivi…

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,…

The Donner Party

A snowy white landscape with a solitary leafless tree against a white sky

“What do you do around here for fun?” Rivi asks. “Sitting on the porch in Adirondacks during a snowstorm isn’t your idea of fun?” I say. “I mean, it’s nice,” she says, “but it’s not really exciting.” “You don’t move here for excitement,” Tina says. “You move here for the quiet.” “And the coyotes,” Hunter adds. “And the stars,” Boone says. “I noticed that last night.” I nod. “Yeah, you haven’t seen a night sky until you live where there are no streetlights. You should have been here during some of the auroras. That was some pretty impressive nature, I…

Rivi, Destroyer of Worlds

“You should really do something with all this art, Sebastian,” Rivi says. “There’s so much of it.” She has been flipping through my virtual portfolio on my laptop, without asking permission first, of course. She’s more of an “act first, apologize never” sort of person, really. “I am doing something with it,” I say. “I’m keeping it on a hard drive and letting it age gracefully.” She grabs a throw pillow off the couch and does exactly that with it: throws it at me. “Don’t be a dip,” she says. “Do something with it. Put it on your blog.” “I…

A Feral Princess

Close-up of a tarnished doorknob set in a door covered in peeling paint, and bits of rusted metal. It is an old and weathered door.

I am supposed to not know that Rivi, Boone, and Tina are coming to pay us a visit in our house in the woods, and so when I open the front door to them after they knock and the dog barks the arrival of someone at the porch, I make sure that I am wearing my most authentic surprised face. “That’s a bullshit look if I ever saw one,” Rivi says. “Somebody told you we were coming.” “Shut up and hug me,” I say, wrapping her in an embrace. “It’s still bullshit,” she says. “It was Tina, wasn’t it? Boone…

Sugar Kisses

Extreme close-up of stacked cubes of sugar, under low key lighting

My phone rings while I am out across the property, shoveling pathways in the snow through the chicken run. The chickens do not enjoy walking through snow, and will all just stand inside the doorway to their coop for the entire day if they don’t have a trail dug for them to follow. I suppose if my feet were a half an inch thick, I wouldn’t want to be walking through a foot and a half of snow, either. I pull off one of my gloves and take my phone out of my pocket. “Rivi,” I say when I answer…

Old School

Dear Rivi: I have been thinking a lot recently about how much more enjoyable the Internet was back in the old days. I know, I know: hardly an original observation. Still, it’s been very much on my mind. Remember when it took five minutes to download a photo? On dial-up? Remember when there wasn’t any streaming music, let alone streaming video? Remember when the way people communicated was generally all text-based, either in chat rooms or BBSs? I’m telling you, Rivi, we didn’t know how good we had it. So that brings me to where my head is at today.…

Election Night, Anxiety Night

Dear Rivi: And here we are again, teetering on the edge, like we did in 2020, and in 2016, and I’ll tell you something: I am over all of this bullshit. How dare Americans be so shitty. So racist. So fascist. It’s both sickening and disheartening, while at the same time being this really pointed reminder that people have to fight for progress every goddamn time, or risk sliding back into the dark ages. And yes, I know that it’s not all Americans who are shitty, but it’s honestly far too many of them that are, and it turns my…