Tag: Fiction
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The You Not Looking
Something’s been holding back the words. It might be the version of me that’ll read these lines one day. Winding me down back roads toward a painted horizon, as fabricated as one on the set of an old western. Pulling my eyes from the one I’m driving towards. Still, something’s been holding back the words.…
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Knee-high by the Fourth of July
On the opposite side of the road passed the third pickup he’d seen that afternoon donning an oversized American flag waving in the blackened air behind the cab’s smokestack exhaust pipes. Patriotism, he thought as stomach acid warmed his chest, muddied and misled. The giant flag, strung from a 4’’X4’’ wooden post, flapped in animated…
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Copyright Permissions
Yours is the letter I cannot will myself to pen. I fear the contents will be too vast, the envelope too weak to seal. I fear the words will be too heavy, the postage too expensive to afford. This ink is laden with the breach of silence that has been my years since you. Shouts…
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Attic
All day I have been hearing jazz faintly playing in my room. It does not seep through the wall nor does it rise from the chambers below. The riffs are generated within my mind. My ears glimpse phantom sound waves—unseen, invisible. Their nonexistence will startle me any longer. For I am a music box 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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Penned Out
Ideas, once inked in permanence, are now buried beneath an ever-growing, pixelated timeline. (Is it so much different than having them closed between bound pages and set up on rarely visited bookshelf, the stacks in the library surrounded by thin carpet tread upon no longer?) They are suffering silent agony in the bottom of a…
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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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Radical Writing Mantra
Plunge beyond the blue yonder. Sail high. Shoot visible tingles out of your fingernails. Explain an event. Order disorder. Keep the details to a minimum. Do not provide a frozen description or a still life. Provide action. Zoom in while walking backward. Invent the compression shot on paper. Purger thyself.
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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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Depressive Tempests
“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.” – William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness It is never so simple to say, “listen here, this is an exact depiction of mental illness,” as is it not simply the case in…
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Sixth Floor Paradise
After ascending a slew of concrete stairs, you reach this door. Throw your shoulder into it or else you won’t get it open. Once you do, though, you step through this threshold that separates the desolation of the staircase column from a plateau of peacefulness. You could turn to the right and trot into 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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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…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 