Browse Topics

Speaking In Tongues

And when the morning had come, sure enough, there was the Holy Spirit, less like a poltergeist and more like a cat, perched on a comforter on the old steamer trunk at the end of the bed.

“Paradise Is The Release From The Worlds Of Birth And Death”

Jerking Off In Central America

For those of you who have never had a panic attack, the words may have no special emotional tug. For those of you who have had one, they will bring forth memories of a mind frozen in exquisite agitation, the whole room, the whole world enmeshed in a horror movie that refuses to go away.

December 1994

Table Manners

The full-page ads by big corporations proclaim peace on earth, when all they really want is another piece of the earth.

The Personals

Someone who should have listened to her intuition, a beautiful brunette, a cat woman

A Portrait Of Angels

Later, when Sheldon stood up to leave, Anna saw the angel hovering right behind him, between him and the door. She wondered what would happen if Sheldon collided with her angel. Would the angel be shattered, smashed, burst into shards of light? Or would Sheldon emerge glowing, shining with a delicious softness?

School For Love

Derek was unfaithful Thursday. He told me today. It hurts. OK, they didn’t do it — just kissed. But he asked her to go to bed and she refused (because he was married). But still, it could have happened. In a sense, it did happen. Is it just a cultural constraint that makes me so bothered by it? Am I just the defective offspring of a defective culture?

Betrayals

“Mask her!”, “No nemina!”, “He’s beating her up again”

My Journal Of The Plague Years

I saw Bobby the day before he died. Propped up beneath a plastic oxygen tent, he begged for a cigarette. I went across the street to a newspaper stand and bought him a pack, even though I don’t smoke and don’t think anyone should. Closing the door to his room, I turned off the oxygen and lit one for him.

Original Sin

I knew well enough that, without drastic cause, mothers like mine do not entrust their adolescent sons to aunts like Louise. Surely, Mother would have kept me among her own people if there had been any.