She stood at the edge of the path, watching the field. She tried to stay out of the way of walkers and joggers. She was conscious about that now. She didn’t care what she looked like, but she didn’t want to be in the way.
She still didn’t care about a lot of things that had used to seem important. Apparently she would again one day. That’s what people in the group said. It was hard to believe. Right now, she felt this would be the rest of her life. Numb.
Continue reading… "Fluke"Guys like Bernie Fuller who are intellectuals like baseball a lot more than other sports. Bernie says it’s the poet’s game. He says that you can find whole sections of books like the Baseball Encyclopedia full of witty things that baseball people, and not just Yogi, have said. Not so with football or basketball. Not so at all. He says many great writers have written stories about baseball but hardly any about football or basketball.
Continue reading… "Existential Futility"Ever since we started the build, we came to know the copper-smelling mud that mounded the edges of the construction site. Khaki-brown and tar sticky, we knew how to get on our knees to scrub it clean.
We knew that six pallets of smooth gray slate weighed just over 24,000 pounds. We knew how to calculate sales tax and shipping. We knew that, after spending six
Continue reading… "These Are the Things We Know"She feels the mattress sag under the weight of him. His movement is deliberately coordinated, meant to not interrupt her slumber. Only, she is awake. She lies perfectly still.
His breath is shaky with the effort of removing his clothes while sitting on the edge of the bed. She hears the sigh of his trousers onto the floor, the dull thud of his belt buckle. In almost 22 years of marriage, this is the lazy way
Continue reading… "Intersection"I wake up every morning, and think that I am strong enough not to have coffee. But the truth is, I have coffee anyway. This is how it unfolds. I lie in bed thinking, I feel pretty good. The rash isn’t too bad at the moment. I should probably start a detox diet today. I’ll just wake up, have a little decaffeinated green tea, then something like fruit and
Continue reading… "The Rash Diaries"A place is cleared for the barber, moving aside boxes of donated diapers, baby food, bibs, tampons. The tarp he stretches over the well-stomped dirt is the green color of a bountiful spring, in direct contrast to the cold rain pouring beyond the awning.
Continue reading… "A Shave at the Evacuation Camp"Jade’s clearest memory is of the night her mother tried to drown her. She recalls loud, hysterical laughter as Jade told knock-knock joke after knock-knock joke. Tank who? Boo who? Olive who? Her mother laughed so hard she cried, and then the walls of the small bathroom were closing in on the two of them.
Continue reading… "The Drowned"Sunny California began her career in director Pierre Woodman’s film, “The Good, the Bad, and the Naughty,” a wild-west themed hardcore film featuring—among others—stars Eva Angelina and Tori Black (just prior to her retirement from the industry). Sunny appeared in a segment with another rising starlet, Scarlett Gray, in a lesbian love scene.
Continue reading… "American Pornography: Rejected Free Press Interview With Sunny California"My husband is dead; I can finally tell the truth.
Endings have always been hard for me. The end of this story, my telling of what happened, how it unfolded like the wings of an origami crane and then kept unfolding until it was nothing more than blank paper too wrinkled for use, will probably go awry. I’ll be compelled to tidy up,
Continue reading… "Goldenrod"It’s in Chicago’s Shedd aquarium of all places.
I’m there on a rainy weekday, one of those rare times when the great marble-columned front hall isn’t rebounding with children’s voices. Only the unemployed would be there at such a time, poking around the water snake tanks in the dark corners of the jungle habitat. Only the people
Continue reading… "The Way We Meet"