September 2018

His door was different. The rest of the doors in our modest home were hollow white composite, but my father’s door was deeply stained solid knotty pine. I spent a good amount of my early childhood on the floor outside that door, wondering when he was ever going to let me in. It wasn’t my … Read More

The Headache A miniature roofer climbed to the side of my head. Ladder against skin, and poised with hammer, so uncool, so unbeautiful, that his work is like a drumbeat that it could unhinge a painting. The steady chant is like music, and I am good practice for his art, and my eyes are crossed, … Read More

When the phone rang and I learned I’d been called on to interview Charles Dickens, the first noise in my mind was the callow exclamation I imagine would have passed through anyone’s mind: But I didn’t know he was still alive! Was this unreasonable? Dickens had always evoked, for me, a world that seemed thoroughly … Read More

In the summer of 1978, Frank J. Cole was working as a security guard at the Ramada Inn in Gatlinburg, a tourist town at the main entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. I was a desk clerk and general gopher for the same establishment. Frank was in his mid-fifties, but in … Read More

ORANGE. At least that was what Graham thought when he first saw her. She sat on a barstool in a skin-tight orange dress, and he immediately ordered a Screwdriver without realizing why. She was the reason he dreamt entirely in orange later that night. A hazy, ruptured dream. A faceless girl with endless tan legs … Read More

He wasn’t sure, but he’d swear the doctor just said he wants to take his right arm off. The whole arm, from the shoulder down. The doctor was still talking, but like the teachers in the Charlie Brown cartoons from his childhood, what he heard was “Wah wah wah wah.” He looked over the doctor’s … Read More

The Cradle A hushed cradle on the fog-bone sea, pulled out in tides, away from a shore it has never set foot on. The sea reaches up. Wind-formed fingers reach endless, useless – reaching up to hear, to hold; hold the cotton-webbed echoes of when the sky loved her, hold them to her cheek, everything … Read More

All the stars and planets arose from mist. There’s a cigarette, there’s a dusky room, a massive counter, a coffee maker, there are wooden tables and snow-white tablecloths, there are photographs on the walls, reflexes in window panes, colourful bottles, then again there is bright light from the street, there’s a grey gate, a chestnut … Read More

I rotate the toothpick inside my mouth, staring at the jar holding a dried gold poppy wrapped around the Chuckwalla lizard skull I found for my wife. She told my daughter it was her favorite one. My daughter hasn’t spoken to me in three days. # “Daddy, look!” my daughter urges, pointing at the smiley … Read More

On Black Friday, I waited by the window for my brother. I’d just taken off my jacket and begun unbuttoning my shirt, shoes off, belt unbuckled. My book on common law was waiting for me on the nightstand across from my wife who had her scrubs on and the television turned down low. That was … Read More