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When I was nine years old, I fell through the rotting
boards that covered my grandmother's cesspool and nearly
drowned.
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Beyond the parrots and the palms, she can see an airplane resting in the canyon below, belly up, wings like outstretched arms, the occupants inside presumably rotting in their seats.
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"I read a cute animal story yesterday," I tell them. "And I was filled with rage. I can't live like this. There must be no more bears, or hamster-bears, or manatees, being hopeless and depressed. There must be no more cute animal stories—ever."
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“Hey, come on and sit down,” Jake motioned to her.
It was three in the morning and after way too many gins the last thing Melisa wanted to do on New Year’s Eve was to chat with her ex-boyfriend. In fact if she had known he was goin
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A boy sits in a room filled with old, broken toys. A mother is in the next room reading Cosmopolitan, dreaming of a life that should have been hers. There is the zoo and an unnecessary stroller on a very humid day, beads of sweat dripping slowly down a face. A trip to the…
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They say nothing, but instead watch the birds and people hovering. Every day is an echo of the one before, and the weight of waiting has begun to show itself in the stature of the tiny man and his little old wife. …
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What else, H, is there to say about heartbreak? What else could it be but our hands, cupped as if holding water against our chests, then broken into halves. Or the picture of this one, pretending to load a gun. Or this one, soaked in smoke—asking for
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So lie there like a sodden Brussel Sprout. Leave your paramour to thrash about in vain.
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Lu peeked at his cards again. They were still jacks, and they still looked mighty nice.
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A surreal conversation in a library hints at something else.
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Mark looked at the barrel. Will had filled it to within inches of the top, and that meant the water was cold enough to take away breath, cold enough to make lips turn blue. Even if it had sat all day in the sun, the bottom would be cold, but now, after
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My best friend Khaled’s idea was, he’d set up a pool tournament. Nine-ball. Each church would send a player, and whichever church won, he’d join. Any church that wouldn’t shoot pool, he wouldn’t want to join.
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Enter Tipitina’s – the rotation hole
where electric, shoeless uncles
allocate their copper goulashes
to catch white dripwater.
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One day when they were sitting on the curb together at 4th Street and Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa and Joe was calling out to passers by in a singsong voice, “Spare change for cigs,” she had persuaded them that they should try to join the circus.
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There are problems we lovingly fashion . . .
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The rocket shone in the distance. Cape Canaveral had never looked so pretty.
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Me and the wife are tucked away in our little house.
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I am skinniest in the morning. My belly forgets the previous day’s sins, and I wake up looking taut like a model. Then it starts.
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I drove all night, but there weren’t nothing Roy Orbison about it. I’d been driving and around lunchtime I just thought I might stop by Shona’s place.
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I could feel the old house skulking in the shadows. In the basement I used to play in the dark, shine a flashlight on the angular black widows creeping in the corners, feed them ants and silverfish and flies with the wings pulled off so the web wouldn’
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Inside my high-rise studio apartment there are only three locations where Crane Man can't see me. The bathroom is one—although he watches me go in and he watches me come out. Crane Man does a lot of watching. Sometimes it seems he spends more time looking…
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We are driving towards New Jersey, my husband and I, to pick up our seventeen-year-old daughter who is visiting her father for the weekend. As we drive there, I am suddenly reminded of how much I used to love my ex-husband, particularly when I was sevente
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The old man’s face is worn and tired, his nose and cheeks tinted red over his pale black skin from the frosty January winds blustering through town. He looks more than half frozen, which I don’t find surprising.
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There is an obstacle, as if truth has a place of its own. This is the phantom where my roommate turns off her headlights Upstate, while we’re singing: No more, No more, stay as you are.
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The young cop says, “Sorry ma’am, you’ll have to wait.” In the strobing red-blue glare he looks like a teenager. Melissa wonders if Tony had looked so young when he started, all those years ago.
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Here lately Daddy's been talking bout' filling momma full of holes. Not like he would do it cause' he likes talkin' just to hear the words come out even if they don't mean anything to anyone but him. But just to be on the safe side I went and hid them shells cause' he's got…
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Joseph K. ran a publishing house in the shadow of the Castle.
Perhaps “publishing house” is too grand a title. Joseph K. kept a battery of six or seven (depending on repairs) manual typewriters, a crate of carbon paper, and a large stapling machine
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She had a body like an upside-down viola da gamba without the sound holes, frets or strings. Full at the top, narrowing at the waist, slender legs where the neck should have been.
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I don't know when it was I first stumbled across your blog. I know I definitely must've followed the link on your twitter profile, but how I found you in the first place, I have no idea. But fate works in mysterious ways, I suppose. I remember I then visited your blog every…
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