When your dead cousin visits, you’re pleased he doesn’t smell of garbage-strewn alleys and rank BO, like his late-night poundings on your door when he’s all Come on cuz, you’ve always had it better than me, share the wealth.… Continue Reading
Make yourself look like you’re the mass killer in a courtroom, and the family’s all watching you, the stylist says. My family or the victim’s family? I ask. Uh, either one, the stylist says.… Continue Reading
He watched her staring out the window above the sink, her face opening and closing, lost in two radically different futures that flicked back and forth in her mind. The forcefield between realities quivered. He’d never felt more hopeful or more lonely.… Continue Reading
On Monday he ate through one Masonic treasure map. On Tuesday, he ate through two CIA truth serums. On Wednesday, he ate through three Church of Scientology Operating Thetan documents. On Thursday he ate through four Operation Paperclip Nazis’ employment contracts, but he was still hungry.… Continue Reading
I field call after call. My bungee cord of nonsense words stretches out across the metropolis, unknotting electrical cords, picking locked bathroom doors, yanking Londoners off railings and Tube tracks. All the while, I coo over the rescued bird.… Continue Reading
“You’re too pretty for pink eye.”… Continue Reading
“‘The curse,’ as my grandmother put it, landed my father in prison. He’d almost killed a guy with a golf club over a fifty-dollar poker debt. Ma never let us visit. Our father became a choice: you have a collect call from an inmate at USP Otisville; do you accept these charges?”… Continue Reading
And we may well discover that those for whom death had decreed premature be forever consigned to your heart much like a terminal disease, much like a wound of war. And we shall never forget it.… Continue Reading
His is an enlarged heart untrammelled by human concerns. Hers is a rose that fervently wishes it held less bloodied thorns.… Continue Reading
I was flattered. R__ had read my novel. Not many had. And then she had both texted and emailed me. It wasn’t hard to read between these lines. She needed me.… Continue Reading