Category: Fiction
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Sunlight on the Number 9
April brings out the sunglassed ladies who don their frames on an afternoon bus ride through South Boston. Yuppie chicks and their bug eyes and dark lenses hide vulnerable souls from interlocutors found on smart phone applications they meet over drinks. Polarized eyes aid the creation of plausible lies. Vanity is victorious. There in the front of…
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Observing a Sneeze
Leaving the country for the summer can be kind of a big deal for 15-year-old girls. While it is not always the case, a venture like this can be a game-changer, moreover, a life-changer; going to Rome for three weeks of the three months of freedom between academic years did more than alter her worldly…
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Street Parking Woes
Angelica hadn’t worked there but three weeks before she realized something was amiss. On Friday, she walked to her car during her sacred lunch break to find the all too recognizable florescent orange of a parking ticket envelope glaring from under the passenger side wiper blade. It was the fourth time the parking authority had…
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Darkroom Lighting Adjustment
He glimpsed in her the possibility of an unwavering light; the constant, overpowering source of life that allows nothing dark to stay without an interrogation proving its validity. She, for a moment, caught sight of a hidden trove of underexposed prints in the darkroom of his soul, and with her assuring smile, replaced the gloomy…
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Here Has Been Us
At the end of the driveway, out of reach from the parental sensor light, the car off save for its accessorized music maker, two adolescents conversed. “Maybe I wasn’t driving at all. Maybe the roads were actually operating as treadmills and they moved under us. We remained stationary. We didn’t really just drive there, the…
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Snow Dances
Dusty waves of snow lap the pavement in curved sheets, rounded like a preschool teacher’s sample shapes. A lesson in scissor dexterity. Wind propels the white mass against my shoes, breaking formation like a group of synchronized swimmers, dancing in spirals around my calculated steps and meeting again on the other side. Floating in fluid…
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Mr. Most Likely to Succeed
I started another restaurant job yesterday. The kid who trained me my first day introduced me as the guy who was voted most likely to succeed for his high school yearbook. He grinned and chortled like a tranquilized banshee immediately after divulging that information then proceeded to tell me how important it was to drink…
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Fourth to Last Train Home
The hour was not incredibly late, but both parties were quite weary from their respective days’ toil. It had been a long, dog day of midsummer. They each carried aches in their bodies, but the weariness stemmed from elsewhere. There was a mental exhaustion at play, a soft drone humming on the part of the…
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Spoon Licks
Bits of ground coffee lodged themselves in between what teeth were still sticking in his beet-red gums. The tip of a rollie hung gently from the top of his lip while he humbled, that is hummed and mumbled, some conjured-up words to nestle between the clankity clanking tings he made while the spoons hit themselves,…
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Flies Dance in the Floodlights
It had now become a ritual that after every break-up he would go for a walk in search of a baseball diamond. If there were bleachers there, he would sit and wait for a pickup softball game to begin and he’d watch it to completion. There were seldom others spectating at these low-stakes games, and…
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Chlorine and Sea Spray
A four-star hotel had its foundation near where the Pacific laps the mainland with a ravenous host of frothy tongues. Two skinny hoods skated past on splintered boards with rusted bearings that squealed, hungry for replacement or grease whatever remedy would silence their pangs. Their hunger was osmosed through the feet of their riders. The…
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Outside the Ellison Duplex
The young men wore smirks of a mutual malice. Their expressions were either meant to ward off or attract simple-minded questions, depending on who may happen to be doing the asking. Questions like the kind that Hopscotch Joey had trotted up and asked last week as the little band of twenty-something tough guys stood outside…
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Cloth Doll Daughter Story Discussion
A slender woman standing in front of the chalkboard points her chin toward a boy seated in the second row of desks. “Go ahead.” “That’s not the way I see it,” he says, pulling his right arm down and crossing it across his chest on top of his left. “So,” Miss Marcy begins, “what do…
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Willow Creek
I remember when Stacy and I would go down to Willow Creek to skip rocks. I’d get mine all the way across; hers would only travel about half the way before descending out of view. “No one’ll ever try to skip that one again,” I’d say as the stone tucked itself in to the muddy…
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Pinball Wizards
We all had it in the back of our heads that this wasn’t all that good for us, but we also knew that if we didn’t do this here and now, we’d wake up one day thirty some odd years down the road and see a void where there should have been late-adolescent excitement. So…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 