Every time I heard that click, I couldn’t help imagining that drawer in her chest. That compartment sliding out. Sometimes I pictured skin, other times it was slippery as liver.… Continue Reading
Thrusting your own weight means thrusting a lot. Thrusting because of how it affects your body, not just by changing it, but putting it in proximity with other thrusting bodies. Thrusting because no weight on a bar feels heavier than lonesomeness in your abdomen.… Continue Reading
The area was a tame pocket of wilderness that attracted youth, as places like it sometimes will. Bike jumps loomed through the trees, the occasional empty cigarette packet, a graffiti-stamped drainpipe protruded from the creek’s end where many a young boy or girl’s courage was no doubt tested.… Continue Reading
The next time your dad calls from Atlantic City, you do as you’re told. You open the safe, pack the cash, and head to Western Union.… Continue Reading
Jerome recognizing the man’s profile, asking himself if karma really was the bitch everyone said it was or did payback simply come down to a man taking action after he’d decided enough was enough?… Continue Reading
Our father studied geology and psychology. Was a science teacher, until students proved alien. A stint in the Air Force as potential NASA pathway. Gravity defeated him, exacted its price for warp speed.… Continue Reading
But today, Gary leans forward, breathing emotionally like a heavyset wolfhound, pained, invites me animally into his personal funk (I don’t mind the intimacy, I’m in a good place in my life now), and pulling me in close with his big brown furry eyes—they’re frame-draggers reflecting morass—he moans, “It’s over. It’s over.”… Continue Reading
K’s spending the night at mine because this time his pop has beat him real bad. It’s come out that K’s mom had another kid before she ever met him and K’s pop’s furious, been on a helluva bender for days, which only ever leads to one thing. Fists.… Continue Reading
i came along like an accident, just after my mother’s first miscarrage. i dropped into her life like a toy from a claw machine. who’d thought she’d win a prize, much less the one she wanted.… Continue Reading
And in that moment Hamish’s effervescence collapses into a droplet of unremarkable liquid, a blank face, straight back, the boy that Dick recognises but wants to know more about. So he says, “Yeah. Fuck Reading.”… Continue Reading