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Fiction
Green Street Incidents
I open my eyes and an ex-stripper tells me to fuck off. Then it must be a couple hours later and I’m upstairs and it’s dark and I’m thinking of quicker ways to kill myself. A far-off foghorn is warning ships away from the cliffs. It’s a sad sound, long and low. I can taste on my teeth what I drank all night. Darling Nikki is asleep on her back on the mattress next to me — I call her that after the Prince song.
June 2009
A New Painting Of Marianne
I wasn’t my idea to call Marianne. I hadn’t talked to her since she’d shown up drunk on our porch one summer night and tried to kiss me in front of my wife. That was four years earlier, just before Jenny and I had moved from Phoenix to Tucson. Now we were back in Phoenix and looking to buy a house.
May 2009
This Late Hour
She stopped taking the medicines when it had become clear they were no longer of any use. They had crowded her dreams with demons and angels from some nocturnal Disneyland. Now that she was done with them, her dreams were her own.
April 2009
Rayleen And R.L. Bury Their Luck
My wife, Rayleen, got it into her head that our luck died with our dog, Buddy. “We buried it in a hole in the ground” is how she put it.
April 2009
Boston To New York
“I can’t come to New York,” Edith says over the phone to her only living daughter. She is squeezing a sponge that doesn’t need to be squeezed, standing at her kitchen sink, where a window looks out at skeletal tree branches. It is early April, and the trees of Boston have weathered much this winter: blizzards that smothered cars, wind that twisted metal, hail that punched through glass.
March 2009
Final Dispositions
People think that crazy is achieved when one day the gale-force wind makes a final, violent tear, and your little craft slips its mooring. Oh, no. It is achieved by you, who, one knot at a time, untie the tethers, whimsically at first, and then with some — or sometimes no known — purpose.
February 2009
I’m Not Saying It Happens Like This
You and the stranger to your left and the stranger to your right are one, without the barrier of language between you. Like beads of rain on a windowpane, you merge.
February 2009Morning Coffee
He was bringing coffee in five minutes, at 6:30. She’d been awake for an hour and now sat on the hardwood floor, blowing smoke into the fireplace so her kids wouldn’t smell it. She’d picked up her cigarette habit again since his last episode, the one that had led to his moving out.
January 2009
Griswald
All you know is how sunny it was — so bright you could hardly see — and how the old man kept trying to tip you back into the stream, the water electric and cold, old Mr. Griswald saying not to worry, his hands on your shoulders, him standing in the water behind you, you this little kid, nine or ten years old, that voice of his strange and far above, saying not to worry, saying just lie back, saying he has you, he has you.
January 2009
The Aftermath Lounge
Catch stepped out of his trailer and saw the girl alone on the beach across the highway. She was wading ankle deep in the gulf, wearing a light brown bikini the color of her skin. Catch hadn’t seen anyone on the beach in a long time, not since the hurricane, the one most people in town couldn’t stand to call by name anymore.
December 2008
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