Category: Fiction

Pandora Speaks

Who would have given a damn about me if not for that box?

As punishment for Prometheus’ gift of fire, the gods gave me to men. They gave me to men. I was a poisoned gift. But the importance of a poisoned gift is the venom it bears, not the gift. The box, not Pandora.

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Garglepot

At that age we took our fascination in the lot of the adult world. Through the peers we put to turmoil – musky boys of brashness or slighted vigor, and the balmy girls, the sweet or mousy, the striving harlequins – we accessed the quiet amblings of their mothers and their fathers.

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Eugene

“I don’t think he would have been a loving father. He didn’t have it in him. I think he would have been too scared.”

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Brief Interviews with Terrified Men

“Well, look here. Your grandma started out with a neurologist at Sound Shore. An older gentleman by now, recommended, respected, you know what I’m saying to you. She gets dizzy sometimes. Dad tells you when she goes to the hospital.”

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Feelies

My mother and I returned to the Tucson art museum because Rose Cabat’s daughter told us over the phone that the museum was selling Feelies not featured in the retrospective.

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Run

Exercise—the thesis research of the future.

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Reuse, Recycle, Recover

Maybe he would drop the umbrella, walk away with long strides, and not even glance back at the girl with the ladybug canvas at her feet.

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Manifest Destiny

The best choice Mitt Romney ever made.

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Nothing On the Inside

“It all stopped, very suddenly, for Robert Bailey, just before his 31st birthday. One moment he was thinking, remembering things, talking silently and invisibly in his head—in other words, he was altogether active, interiorly speaking, and then it stopped.”

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Best Picture

They screened Oscar pictures in the smallest, oldest theater with its carved wooden balcony, velvet curtains, a stage pockmarked by dancers’ feet.

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Stieglitz

He’s old, Stieglitz is, when I’m looking at this photograph in my dining room. It’s one hundred and forty-three years since he was born, but he’s still hunched over his desk in his little, crowded gallery like he was when … Read More

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A Dish Window of One’s Own

“…upon closer inspection you realize it’s not paper, it’s a full hand of press-on nails pressed into the strawberry ice cream pressed into the bowl. It’s a bridge too far.”

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