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Tweet Tacked awkwardly onto the end of a long-unopened file, I just stumbled upon the first work of fiction I ever intended to write. I was twenty-one. It’s been a decade. I’m someone that twenty-one-year-old wouldn’t recognize; I might be someone he wouldn’t like. I know I wouldn’t care for him—I didn’t like . . . → Read More: Negative Space Tweet Sunrise The attic’s effluvium is a complex mélange: one-third salt, one-third mold, one-third urine. Hot spruce. The medley is equally identifiable on the palate; I can taste it, I never seem to adjust. All July and August, every breath is like gargling with swampwater, each a heavy, slow-simmered nauseous experience. The . . . → Read More: Pink Turtleneck About Which No One Asks Any Questions Tweet In early summer ’07, my closest friends left town without saying goodbye. There’s a story behind this, the lack of parting salutations, but I didn’t hear it for two years. The short version: one of these friends, the wife in a married pair, told her husband and, apparently, everyone else she knew that I’d been . . . → Read More: Reveal the Best of Me Tweet Simplify, simplify. If I hadn’t already mulched my dog-eared, trade-paper copy of Walden/Civil Disobedience, I could have extended that quotation profoundly, instead of merely adumbrating the idea. Simplify. By November of 2000, I had a mattress. Stained and remaindered from a two decade-old futon, it laid without linens on the unfinished wood floor, piebald with . . . → Read More: Failing the Litmus Test for Apathy Tweet A thick blade of yellow, dead grass tickles the sensitive membrane inside the rim of my nose. My whole body spasms; I snap upright and paw with dirty palms at my eyes, chipping away the grainy caulk of unconsciousness. Eyes open, I seem stricken by synaesthesia: the phosphorescent lemon sunlight registers as a . . . → Read More: Lifeline Tweet Error’s mother was disappointed when she didn’t die as promised during childbirth. He knows this because she told him. He tries never to think of it so, of course, he always does. The story goes like this: Four months after he prolapsed her uterus during a difficult breech, Keiko swaddled her son in cotton sheets, . . . → Read More: Gehenna Tweet She is in the passenger’s seat of her car. On break and pushing down her cuticles with the edge of a blackened penny. The oppressive air is a medley led by piss her cat left on his final trip to the vet and winter snowfall which slipped through loose-wound windows, melted and mildewed. The closed . . . → Read More: Manicurist’s Satori Tweet Shh. I have lied and said “I love you” to more women than there are fingers to count them upon. Imagine that. If it was done with a harbinger’s hope of heralding more magic into our world, am I less a villain? (2003) Tweet When I get there, she’s already on the couch under an electric blanket, propped on six pillows. The velour cushions are slick with sweat. The lights are off and they are to stay off. She watches TV and, in a hushed aside, without ever looking at me, tells me that she’s done it. He’s at . . . → Read More: Abortion Tweet When I leave the bar I swear I’m steady, even demonstrate by touching fingertips to eyelids. “See,” I say, “fine motor skills.” So you let me go and I drive forty minutes on empty predawn freeways, all the time fighting dual urges to throw up, pass out. I’ll wake up behind the dumpster or—best case— . . . → Read More: DWI |
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