I remember, most vividly, the tea my mother used to dye her auburn hair, the soup of crushed marigolds, rose hips, and paprika. It was crimson, like the blood that drips from Pete and Willow’s goats this morning, young wethers with slit throats strung up on a clothesline. I’m busy enough to look away, forget…
Irish Maupin, immobile again in her old city, in a tearoom with white linens, sat fatter than she’d ever been, fatter than anyone had ever been in the history of recording such things. Faint from eating too little too fast, she found in a ruffle of her collar a sliver of candied grapefruit peel. She…
This nighttime beach is suddenly a sandy stage, and we’re blinking at our audience in their spotlight: two guys in a speedboat trolling for castaways. Everyone comes out of their stupor quicker than me. Candi chants “S.O.S., S.O.S.” and the others yell “Woo-hoo!” and “Yeah!” as if they’re at a concert. I’m the only one…
He surprised himself by claiming his father’s old nickel-finish Colt revolver. There was no battle to be fought here—no one else wanted the thing; no one wanted any of the guns that now were lined up in the cabinet (they couldn’t sell them, a legal issue, something about permits, which everyone agreed, though annoying, sounded…
For four days I’d been sitting at a conference table with engineers from the different outfits that had been pulled together for this project, and across the table was a guy who I’d bonded with after I saved his hide on some controls issues and he saved mine on some line specs. Since then, we…
She wasn’t surprised to end up in his office, but she’d always thought it would be about her son, not her daughter. There was a lesson in it: Instead of worrying about the ones who didn’t fit in, you should worry about the ones who seemed to fit in too well. “It’s not uncommon,” he…
Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. —“The Secret Miracle,” by Jorge Luis Borges M woke up in a strange room with her name, Leeza, on his lips. A…
Let’s say the world comes to you from outside. Why not? What are you but malleable organic bodies, nothingness within variegated layers of hard and soft tissue pumped with H2O, birthed into the torment of the world? Your orifices—eyes, ears, nose, mouth, anus, genitals, skin—flutter open, and you are ready for business. Me, Kitty, too….
Just past midnight, when it looked like things might get out of hand, Greer brought out the baseball bat he kept under the bar and, holding it cocked, edged toward the tall red-haired punk with the bad mouth, and his two jerk friends. “Time to go home, boys,” he said. “You better think, man,” the…
No products in the cart.