Category: Fiction
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Yule
Fingers of a lady sitting on the evening train viciously storm the pages of sparkling new book simply entitled Christmas Poems. With a curious smile I peer down from where I stand and remind myself it is the 18th of June.
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Route 8 East (Tralnor Hunting Pt. 1)
“Dude,” Hector Christman pushed through clenched teeth, “that was a cop car.” “No it wasn’t,” the driver shot back, his voice cool, metallic. “That car is always parked there. Trust me. It may have been a cop car at one point, years ago. Now it’s an old taxi cab. Vehicular evolution is a follows: police…
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Temperance of Permanence
She met him when neither of them could stand to be alone. They remedied this by getting together. Now they’re face to face and he’s trying to tell her how now he can’t seem to be with anyone. The tightrope walk between being available and being alone is an act he’s made his own. Acrobats…
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Open Wide | Uber Ride
This one time when I was young the casing of a popcorn kernel hugged a hind tooth in my mouth for the better part of a month. That tooth has a number. My dentist is in her early 30s and she has that early 30s pep about her that most girls that age have forfeited…
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Cinematic
It is a little-known fact that when you look at the back of a movie poster you see a mirror image of the picture on the front. The same goes for how the images look when you stand behind the movie screen itself. Spend enough time in the seats of a cinema, and you will…
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Middleton
Middle age endows its members with, amongst strands of grey, bushels of gifts. Most are neglected, others embraced, but none must go unnoticed. Years accumulate, begging the excavation of long-buried relics—memories tucked under blankets of time. Unlike meticulously dusted deposits of Jurassic carbon, the artifacts of days past have a tendency to uproot hurriedly from…
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Measurable Time
INT – A MODEST DWELLING – LATE NIGHT The slim frame of ALEC passes a doorway where a man with grey in his beard sits facing the other direction. BARRY stirs in his chair and calls the figure he hears rustling in the other room to come speak with him. BARRY speaks, inaudibly, to the…
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A Story About Running
“So, it’s a story about love?” “No. It’s a story about running.” “Oh. Tell it again. I must not have been listening.” “Way back when your mom and I used to share an apartment, I used to go running. I went nearly every day. And nearly every day, I would ask your mom to come…
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Washed Away with the Floodwater
The old man adopted Kiddo in April at the suggestion of his eldest granddaughter. She told him a puppy would be good for him, what with a year of living alone under his belt. When she first offered the idea, just a short time after Julia went to the Lord and the walls of the…
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Seeing the Signs
Observing signs in the modern age. In the city… There’s a man standing facing the flow of foot traffic when I get to the train station. I notice an easel stand with a sign clipped from fasteners on the top edge. The thick black words on the sign ask of the passersby, “Do you know…
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The Driving Southbound Rain
There was more rain than he had seen in one place. It was less like driving through rain and more like driving while a five-gallon bucket emptied over the windshield over and over. The wipers thudded in sloppy rhythm as he reached for the final inch of coffee waiting cold in the styrofoam cup. About…
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A Mass Engraving
Requests come in daily. They are from loved ones wanting a rubbing from the Wall. A rubbing of the engraving they have requested be mailed to them. Loved ones who are unable to make the trip to the capitol. Loved ones who will not see their own eyes staring back from the glassy black wall.…
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Softly-Filtered Wool Sweaters
The drives seemed to be endless, those he took with his father. An endless motor hum, and endless drone of rubber on the highway, an endless silence choking the air between driver and passenger. The silence was unbearable. Paul always wondered what was going through the older man’s mind as he sat silent behind the…
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Lights on the Farmhouse Table
Retrospect would have had me listen a whole lot closer when Dale Parish first told me about the lights. You know what they say about hindsight. Dale lived his whole life on his family’s farm. Ever since grade school, he’d start first period having already been up at least four hours. The rest of us…
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Visiting Gram
“She’s doing much better today, dear,” the portly woman behind the desk tells me as I sign my name on the guest registry. This marks my eighth time here in four weeks. I have signed and dated this page eight times, each time wishing it would be the last. You might think I wouldn’t have…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 