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Gibraltar
We expect the days like this, but they come only when they like, and carrying their monstrous young inside them, waiting. There were dust motes, but Philip didn’t see them. Nor could he remember faces, just then, nor forms. There simply was the sea. And Africa! he reminded Alice, pointing to the coast, inanely, which…
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Summer Postmodern
The boy has black hair that’s clipped to be unkempt. From a mall bench, he eyes two girls, who wander past in the distraction of gossip and pre-ripped jeans. He wonders which he would prefer. But he stops himself, in curt distaste, when he sees them enter a store he would not go to himself.…
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What a Catch!
A man, Dave A dog, Charlie A woman, Alice —no dialogue is audible— The action opens on a bright sunny spring day on a residential street of a bustling city. Music: chipper.
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Dr. David Bain, who made me pee in a cup
David Bain was a doctor, a world class physician. Just not by traditional standards. He had no degree, no formal training, no office with loud paper sheets, stethoscopes and tongue depressors and no tubs of biohazard sharps. But when he corrected the mistaken masses with a forceful “Doctor Bain, that’s Doctor Bain,” I found it…
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Fleshed Out
Warm Up Drawing – ten minutes “Ten minutes on the egg-timer…and…go!” I barked softly. The carpeted block staged the model’s gangly flesh, her nakedness roosting on fuzzy gray institutional carpeting. Her back was slightly arched, and her breasts quivered over her ribcage, puddling like melted peach snowcones. Her left leg was bent at the knee,…
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Mixed Tongues
One sunny Saturday morning, at the end of my first week in Japan, Ms. Shinako arrived, packaged gift in hand, bowing deeply and smiling as she stepped through the door. She was in her mid-twenties, petite and a little bit mousy, with long black hair coming down to her shoulders, which she kept sweeping behind…
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My Favorite Things
I like the scent of Princeton, New Jersey and sunset on the golf course behind Forbes. I like the bustle on Nassau Street and the uterine warmth of the Terrace TV room. I like the Dinky’s whistle and the Sunday morning sound of the Grad Tower bell calling the faithful to worship. I like the…
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Amo, Amas, Ahmed
When Ahmed was born those twenty or so years ago, the world was taking a piss. His mother screamed in agony as his overlarge head forced its way out of her vagina. His father, preferring oblivion to the messy, bloody process that is birth, smoked himself retarded outside the whelping chamber.
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31 Stories in 30 Words or Less
30 Words: The grasshopper sat serenely. Its multifaceted eyes, though expressionless, were wise. The wind blew gently, and did not move the furrowed dirt. In the flicker of an instant, it hopped. 29 Words: “We are the faithful,” he said, “Faith waits for something that may never happen.” I stand silent before the tomb. There…
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Again My Hyperactive Intelligence
I’ve been here for forty days. Each day is the same, by which I mean they are all different. The walls of my room are supposed to be beige, but they’re not. They’re grey. I tried to draw the solar system on my wall with my fingernails, but they caught me and made me stop.…
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Lines Removed From a Eulogy
And what’s more there’d be too much to tell, with his folded-up face and our proximity, the fact that we’d lived so close to each other growing up, that in high school we’d mostly talk to the same girls and dress the same and find the same tired things funny; and in any case there’s…
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The Anniversary
We need a number to plot our love, to propose a first THC, whiskey fake lust romp as love or it would be to us, also, the night a boy walked through a glass door like magic, with sound. When we eat and only talk to the waiter I roll through recorded dates, the first…