“I would hate me too, if I were you,” the boy said to the spaghetti. “Let’s pretend that this is all new, all fresh, that nothing bad has ever happened, that we are meeting just now for the first time.”… more
“I would hate me too, if I were you,” the boy said to the spaghetti. “Let’s pretend that this is all new, all fresh, that nothing bad has ever happened, that we are meeting just now for the first time.”… more
The Santa Claus suit drooped from Clive’s bony arms. It fit him like adult clothing does a twelve-year-old. He pulled a needle from his arm and placed it with the others.… more
An evanescence of the man intrigues me, all the more so because I know of no ending for him yet. He waits there still, a facticity, tottering. Real he is, a thing to see, talk to. Yet erased, a world transpired, unremembering, it being left well enough alone, traceless, himself traceless, yet recurs, to be dredged, the penetrable strata, pluckable. To be plucked or not amid the figments, dying, about to die, a synchronicity, any minute for sure, yet, here, he stands, unnamed as he has stood.… more
It’s 1991 so the boy, Noah, sits in the front passenger seat. Back when that was still okay. He hears but the thing is he doesn’t know his father. Not really. A day and half every fourth or fifth weekend goes fast.… more
Between them silence had always replaced words, a silence punctuated now by the slowing beat of Dial’s heart and the passage of seconds into fewer seconds until the length of something cold ran through him. He allowed himself to sink into a vast, empty space.… more
That night, I dreamt about the cowbird again. It perched on the tip of my nose and laid its eggs in my mouth as I lay paralyzed across a long, flat rock. “You’ll get it someday,” my grandmother said, trying to quell my tears. “You’ll learn.”… more
My family had been killed; yours had lived. But there was pressure in that, that grateful weight.… more
I’ve got a white-knuckle grip on a gut hook knife that needs to be sharpened, clumsily hacking off the asshole of a six-point stag, when it starts to occur to me that this whole thing reminds me of you.… more
The time of the Vests is ending. Their frenzied shouting—sometimes on clothes, sometimes in their own cold corners of the shrinking online universe—represents little beyond the fit thrown by the once powerful losing power.… more
Did you hear Alex is into Black men now? He lost his job? He’s joined up with some TERFs in the UK & is pitching articles to The Guardian. Who was ever even friends with Alex? He’s so insecure. So Indiana.… more