so you leave home and hope it makes you better. you don’t say goodbye and you don’t keep in touch. there is a simmer amidst your sinew and an itch behind your eyes and you are always climbing out of yourself. you can scratch the...
Take the long way home with me, the girl thinks. She is small, slender, a frail-boned thing, with pale freckled skin and hair as dark as ashes. Her eyes are huge and black, large enough to act as mirrors even in foggy light, and rimmed...
Johnny McKinnon was, in many ways, a simple man. He enjoyed large trucks, good beer, and action movies – as long as they weren’t the kind with magic or aliens or other weird shit. He liked hockey games if the teams weren't playing like they...
Are you a sinner? Cain and Abel pass plates at dinner. Stepping onto the bus with that blue knapsack, Mom’s back, smashed, from the pressure of trying to keep you upright. Dad yelled ‘cause you ran up the phone bill again. On the bus after school, A girl told me that you...
INTERROGATION OF MRS. JOHN GRAVES AS TO THE DEATH OF ANGELA TIMONY OCTOBER 29, 1644 “Mrs. Graves,” Moncton said. “Three nights ago, you turned yourself in to my fellow investigator, Mr. Clarkson, claiming yourself to be a werewolf. Do you deny this?” “I do not.” “You then confessed...
Memorandum To: All Staff From: Dog Subject: Stay To Whom it May Concern: Please see me as an emaciated hound, taken off the streets, abandoned at the shelter, lips peeling back to the shine of my bared teeth. A reminder that I am: Ready to bite a hand that dares to...
Let me tell you about Jim Grossman. Now, when I think of Jim Grossman, I can’t help but picture his artificial white teeth. Maureen always said he must paint them with the same stuff they used on their old fence last spring. I tell you...
It’s silly, really, how I cling, nails piercing palms, to that postcard dream of Switzerland. You said it once, just offhand, that you’d love to wake up there one Christmas to the hush of snow, in a silence too perfect to take for granted. And each year I promise myself: Go. Book...