The Park
My dad used to say that you should never half-ass anything, so when I took up smoking at fourteen, I jumped right into a pack a day. At least, that’s what my mom, an explosive little Latina, told me he used to say. He passed
Category Archives: Fiction
Silent Squeals
It’s hard to ignore five hundred pounds of rotting meat, but I was the only one who could smell it, and at first it wasn’t the smell, it was the RUSTLE behind two plain, white double doors that appeared at the hallway’s dead end. I’d
The Funeral Tape
We are all watching my father and the funeral home director fiddle with the cords on the back of a TV and VCR combo-on-wheels that the funeral home provided us. The funeral apparently isn’t only interested in deceased human bodies. “Weren’t they our age when
Dance Of The Tamborines
The sun has just risen. Nebahat sits under the largest dome, on the central marble, with her head dropped down. She’s pondering who knows what, wiggling her toes in her plastic slippers. Her eye catches one or two frail hairs on her legs. She attempts
Logically It Was Easy
A few months before they’d split up, her ex-wife, Cal, had told her about a TV show she’d seen where one character grabbed another by the upper arms, looked into their eyes and whispered, “The Lakota have a superstition that you don’t die properly until
A Child Of No Means
This was in Long Beach, 1996. On the first night of the very first heatwave of the year, Tinoy was in his room with his girlfriend Chana, sharing a joint while listening to the neighbors make love from the apartment above. Outside, the rumble of
Mother and the GPS
I’d would gladly follow my girlfriend into the garbage, despite its interminable odors. I love to kiss her, with those inviting lips and skin and smells of freshly washed socks with fabric softener. I could do this unendingly though my timing is not always on
For the Love of a Dog
I meet Marcus at a minor league game: Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp versus Kissimmee Cobras. The brightly-lit stadium a stone’s throw from the St. Johns River has been renovated to the old-timey feel of a Northern ballpark, but its faux brick and imitation gas lanterns make
The City On a Hill
Placetime coordinate: somewhere, sometime. Neither here and now nor there and then, but rather there and here and then and now. The lively ruins of a city on a hill. A forest grows round it. Waters cut through it. Monsters burrow in and out of
Incorporated
All adults lie. They tell us kids to always tell the truth, but they can’t tell the true themselves. Don’t believe me? Check this out. Last July Fourth, I was at a cookout with some people Sancha knew from her old job at Dietz &