"You wantin' one of them kittens? If we can't give 'em away we're gonna drown 'em. We got too many."

I used to be so certain about right and wrong. About choices and their consequences. About heaven and hell and how there was no room in between no space in between no point in between (take that point how you will)

Jim twisted the skinny trunk of his body in a fast, violent jerk just as the cop grabbed the buckle of his left Harley Davidson boot. When the boot flopped off, Jim found himself sitting upright, ready to jump up and run. But then he felt the baton lock down on his…

One must learn to give the Bull the things/ it needs: space, grass and grain, his mates/ and offspring, and elude the things/ its momentary fury wants- your death

... in view of her sixteen-year-old step-daughter’s barely-concealed hostility, she held her tongue, as she had done for the past ten days.

. . . making a little winter-love, in a dark corner.

Already past the harbinger of yellow crocus

In suburban Jeddah magnificent houses on every corner of the avenues are surrounded by high walls rising up from just inside the roadside curb to much beyond taller than a man.

If luscious lips lusted for love lost, they wouldn't be mine.

The road to heaven is littered for miles with dead sinners, or more precisely, the sides of the roads are lined with crosses on which the sinners are nailed. It has always been so, since time started ticking for Civilized…

Hole #1 – Loop-de-Loop A piece of metal curved into a loop like a curlicue off-ramp. Jake and I step up to the Golf-O-Rama mat like accidental twins. My ball is half blue and half orange, like a gas station freebie. The old man at the desk said I

While laying in his hospital bed recovering from a minor heart attack, Professor Martin Hellman reads details of an ancient book he has been given for translation--Biblos Melas, or, the "Black Book." Excerpted from the forthcoming novel "Minion Web."

As far as I knew it was just an old man and his wife who lived in this house, but not really. I mean if you had seen what every person on that block had, you would have realized that many lived there, well many beings.

We were so easy, so willing to be drained, that to start making those puffed-up stories about us now, our courage, etc. would be purely misleading. Put a bottle, or glass of wine in our hand, and our panties flew off, and gladly we would have followed y

Almonds of childhood – fending off needless tears and chocolate impulses, almonds of my teens, slivered and toasted industrially baked settling in on egg washed croissant…mashed into the kitchen sink of the catch-all bear claw, then the taste and shiv