Now my back makes these little popping noises when I pour a glass of juice. I fantasize about torture devices from the Spanish Inquisition. I want one that pulls from both ends. I might be hunching. I know I’m getting …
Fiction
The Thesis
The first one came as he was attempting to finish up his graduate thesis on near light-speed travel and the future of space exploration. Bernard Rothman went out to his front porch and, thinking it looked to rain, held his …
Historical Fiction
Part One
Historically, there is wind, a hand for a weapon, floods and sacrifice, a woman carried off against her will. There are shared meals, a road leading away from home, troops and treaties, debts unpaid. Historically, this all remains …
Nebraska
—though perhaps I return so frequently to the contest in Baltimore to prove to myself that there is some precedent for what I am experiencing. To create a mental chain, which might be laid across the landscape.
What I would …
Cement Sky
There was Jeanie, stuck up against the reeds and the green brown summer slime all around her ankles. Fitz pressed a last cigarette to his cracked lips and they waded up to Virginia Bridge where the old hardtops passed idle …
Maqbool
The calls always came just around midnight. We were all asleep so the story was told only from my parents’ memory. A man in a deep, husky voice called several times throughout the night and my father had to get …
Procession
The last video he ever watched, because he died a few weeks later, was one he had absolutely no recollection of filming. It was an inclement day, a true Chicago snow. In the front yard, Amber was rolling in the …
Three Back-to-School Stories
1.
White parents, a mom and a stepdad from Bloomington, Minnesota, people who call themselves progressives but vacation every year in Paris, have a problem paying a whole hundred dollars for a list of school supplies generated without transparency. …
Domashniy
Madison had warned her.
Nonetheless Parker was now living with Alex, a recent Russian immigrant she’d met during the Q-and-A following an academic presentation of a Russian gangster movie. She was drawn to his old-world manners and his desire for …
The Less Said
-1-
It was a simple pulley. Not weathered, maybe fixed-eye, with some plastic twine threaded through the sheave. It hung there from a bar, which had been bent in the middle by weight and poor planning. The bar was secured …
