Category: Fiction
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Tall with Long Legs
Tall with long legs. Long and smooth, running on for miles. Elegant and shear. She was dressing in a tee shirt, worn transparent with years. Skin showed through the fabric. When the lady spoke, her head lifted swiftly and he chin cut into the space where her floating words lingered. Her speech was confident. The…
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Recognizing Strangers
Today, on the shuttle that serves as the ankle on the last leg of my morning commute, the one that goes from the subway to the office, I saw this girl I know. She wasn’t on the shuttle bus. She was driving a small SUV next to it. My window seat pulled up next to…
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Man Oh Man(ia)
You’re updating your resume again. You have the urge to write down under accomplishments starting from A to Z: Alcoholic (recovering), bulimic (recovering), cutter (recovering), drug addict (recovering), etc. Or, you want to throw in there, “Has managed, with the help of doctors, chemicals, and family, to keep bipolar disorder from ruining life and the…
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A Cabinet of Coffee Mugs
My father was a quiet, weathered man. Ignoring conventional rules you find in writing manuals, it would be accurate to use the old cliché that he was akin to a closed book. He was reclusive, but pensive. He had been places. More accurately, as he used to tell me, places had visited him. He did…
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Quilt. Dousing campfire. Toy sailboat. Love letters.
The following passages represent four sequential moments from one of my weathered composition books. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. A patchwork quilt is spread upon the jagged, broken stalks of last summer’s crop of corn. The colors are dull, uninviting, like the content of our conversation. We’ve drifted here. Those pieces of fabric were selected with bleary eyes and…
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The Webber’s Sorrow
For the malice Nature thrusts upon us no remedy exists. Time, I have come to believe, is the closest aid in relieving the pain of those circumstances in life over which man has no control. Although time is a concept, an unseen hand in its own nature, it is a healer. What comes to mind…
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Doe Re Meandering
It’s still not clear to me exactly what I was doing driving around that night and when it comes down to hard facts, I could care less. I spent a number of purposeless hours behind the wheel during those months. Maybe it was the result of a living in a small town past my prime…
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Hibernation
Leaves freeze and fall from the limbs that spawned and fed their veins. They are blown by gusts of winter winds, the culprit who makes children’s cheeks turn from peach to apple. I sit by this hollow glass lamp filled with shark teeth combed off beaches of bygone summers. It’s 60 watt, disposable illuminance, must be…
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Trying to Read on the T
I’m outside of my apartment for about three minutes before the trolley stops and its doors bend open to let me in, but I’ve already begun to perspire. The wetness around the base of my neck quickly absorbs into my black shirt collar the same way it’s been feeding the cotton pillowcases on my bed…
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The Goddess Who Lives on the Dirt Road off Route 12
Every morning, on my drive to school, I see her waiting for the yellow bus to come and haul her off to St. Paul’s School for Girls. She wears a red and blue plaid skirt and a navy blue sweater vest because that’s what all the girls have to wear at that place. I drive…
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Page Six
The coats hanging on their pegs look over my shoulder music penetrates my ears drumming through to my feet where they refuse to be still cannot be told where they are treading must contain the shaking legs limbs split the thumping on the carpet where we dug holes for the fish bones found tossed by…
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Ketchup, Bridges, Words.
Drive 272 miles. Check into hotel. Register. Listen. Smile. Nod. Meet new people. Blonde hair. I thought you were a professor. I have saké. I have pistachios. Crack one, pop one. I have greens. Touch lips in the elevator. Look for a condom. Break a condom. I have a fiancé. I am from California. I…
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Nighttime in Early Morning
Hot enough that you could not bear to touch it, but the nerves on the back of your neck danced all the way to the tip top of your head feeling its radiance from a short distance. Those feelings shoot from your bare toes. This swelling, that release. You swear you almost smell burnt hair.…
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Fingertips
A slight, dry wind flowed through the trees and under the sky, pressing black dresses against long legs, making hair frayed and frazzled. Morning commuters buzzed along the streets. Oblivious to the chaos beyond the windshield. Trapped in the awful moment, a day set aside for teardrops and sorrow, a girl got out of her mother’s…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 