Fiction

  • Family Lottery

    Drawings Winners to be announced The prisoner. He had been in long enough, accused for others gain, tried by a court of men who had forgotten how to live, and convicted in innocence by a jury who were hungry for delicacies. In prison he was taught to appear guilty so he wouldn't suffer the hatred…

  • The Elephant’s Decision

    A painter sat down at his table with a dusty canvas before him. On the other side of his studio, his easels stood like a forest. Each one represented a birthday or Christmas in which a relative had come up with the perfect gift. But because he was the type of artist that liked to…

  • Just Like Everybody Else

    Little Bertha Venation would have been the most exquisite young woman of her century, were it not for her distressing tendancy to cheat on her lovers with other men, for a yes, for a no, sometimes not even for a yes or a no. At the time this story begins, her lover was a splendid…

  • Corporal of Artillery

    After three years, eleven months, and two days service, Corporal Fitzgerald re-enlisted for six years, collected a re-enlistment bonus and, that same afternoon, went to the bank in Oceanside and paid the balance of the note of his 1959 Chevrolet which was four years old. He had thought that would make him feel good, but…

  • Marvin Gardens’ Revenge

    So there he perched, a poor sad slob of a young failure, Marvin Gardens, Ph.D., pondering in the deadest center of his ambiguities. Two years past, to the day, he had assessed his life from that identical spot – the large stuffed chair in his small study (not yet, then, had greyish stuffing begun to…

  • In Defense of Pure Sensation

    a spoken & orchestrated work for 1 mass and 2 persons set: Any large city. time: After sunset toward the end of any war. action: Uncountable parties are in full swing behind uncountable broken windows. Uncountable people turnon, drink, fornicate, vomit, laugh, whisper, shout and piss where they stand or sit or recline. Above the…

  • The Rejection

    1. Y. Norman Ludosky had never stirred beyond the confines of the City. He had attended private elementary schools, the university, finally graduate school. All predicted a brilliant future for a singular and original student. He immediately secured a post on the leading intellectual magazine and speedily advanced from book review department to role of…

  • Silent Letters

    A. There was a man, Agur, toward the end of Proverbs. He wasn't a very important man. Maybe he was a failed prophet, these things happen. He wasn't very bright – a mesomorph, chunky and tough, not cut out to be a prophet at all, not good with signs, a stumbler, no king. As though…