While everyone else belly laughs at the hullabaloo, and as your father chain smokes another pall mall, you hear his silver lighter flick open and closed, the sharp metallic clank of metal against metal booms over the commotion.… Continue Reading
We sit silently awhile, Grant adjusting to having company while I drink my coffee. Other Grants–fake fakes–crowd the door, a half-dozen or more, each well-burnished and impeccably bar-lit, shining like Christmas toys, all backslaps and whiskey breath and haughty wheezing, toasting Galena’s Memorial Day Gold Star Ceremony with platitudes and here-here’s. None of them so much as side-eye Grant at the lowboy, a ghost among ghosts.… Continue Reading
When I ask Danny what the poster means he says it’s like all the other stupid school posters and they all mean the same thing. “But what is it?” I ask. “Don’t do drugs,” Danny says.… Continue Reading
It was his taxi where he got stuck daily in crosstown traffic that sent him exploding with rage. This was the taxi where he was once held up at gunpoint and this was the taxi where he took naps during slow afternoons. This was the taxi whose seats he scrubbed with bleach and this was the taxi in which he picked us up from our mother’s house and drove us to school, home from basketball practice, and came to get us in, always, when we needed him.… Continue Reading
The world is ending and I came to this baseball game because, I mean, what else was there to do? Sit in my apartment alone and scroll through Twitter—excuse me, X—reading about the imminent asteroid impact? No thank you.… Continue Reading
She suddenly recalls watching a TV show where a group of Asian men dropped tiny, wriggling octopuses into their open mouths like how the Romans ate grapes. Then, the men swallowed the octopuses whole.… Continue Reading
Ever since my wife moved in with my boss, I had been planning on revenge—gun, knife, poison. None of them are attainable for a guy like me. I’m desperate, and desperation made me hungry. All I wanted was a juicy cheeseburger and a bottle of cold beer.… Continue Reading
The tech guy says, “Everything’s updated, looks like your processor speed is good, you’ve just got a ton of stuff taking up space that doesn’t need to be there.” I ask him what he means, and he shows me that what’s taking space is decades of memories all the way back to when I was in college. I tell him I don’t want to lose them, and he kind of laughs and tells me, dude, that’s why we have the cloud.”… Continue Reading
She was ten weeks pregnant and we had plenty of time to legally do it. She was ready to be done though, and she was beautiful walking away from me down that hot sidewalk, sweating a little, yanking on her purse strap, grinding her heels into every step as though she could push more of the world between us with each footfall.… Continue Reading
Alas, as befits an artpiece, I shall never touch,
only see.
I shall never have him in my privacy,
nor regale him with secrets,
nor behold him in his nakedness,
nor embrace him at my will.
For Steve, above all, adores women,
and I, in my despair,
am a man.… Continue Reading