Ghost Parachute

The eyes will believe the pleasurable, like the S-10 pickup truck I got for my sixteenth birthday. Or the tears on my fiancé’s face when she said yes. Then there’s the depressing, like my father’s name on a granite tombstone. They distort the vision, making it harder to believe. But above all, there’s the terrifying, […]

Moscow, 1812. The Kremlin. “They’re eating their own horses. Horses, for fuck’s sake.” Napoleon pushed his ass deeper into the thick, ornate carpet on the bedroom floor of Tsar Alexander I. It felt good after the tumultuous ride. A small pleasure after so much misery. A bottle of cognac lied exhausted on the floor next […]

Francine liked to make bone broth after a particularly good date. She would wake up early the next morning and spend the first hours of the day chopping, browning, and simmering. She would add a few choice aromatics like garlic and onions, followed by carrots for sweetness. Her neighbor once complained it smelled like a […]

I Selling heirlooms online, pocketing pennies from tip jars, shaking vending machines and performing surgery on our piggy banks, my father is King Midas—money is his life source, the blood that flows through his veins. We’re the rosewater that washes his treasures and makes them cheap. II  In the frozen section at Walmart, in the park […]

She uses her toes to flip the blanket off his legs. She laughs, teasing. He tries to leave the blanket alone but he just can’t. Within seconds, he’s reached down and pulled it back up to cover his legs. She laughs again and kisses his cheek, snuggling in close to him with her warmth and […]

On his way to the EL he pulls out a photo from his satchel. The photo slips out of his hands, gets caught on wind, and glides down Devon Street, rocketing by the endless waves of streetlights shelling down luminance. It sparkles under the soup of moonlight staked across ridges of the cursive Chicago cityscape. […]

We haven’t been home in a year, exactly one year today. I know because I’ve been counting each day since we left, all three hundred and sixty-five of them. Each represented by a tally mark in the back of my diary. Mom calls this place home now. She must not remember that we have another […]

The man had said to live by The Good Book and all of our problems would be solved. How to not lose our entire group, but grow it like our ancestors had—Sarah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob. Each named by another, unlike us, who recently re-named ourselves, and some would say badly. How to identify […]

John’s vision blurred as he slouched over the desk, rubbing his tired blurry eyes and flipping again and again through the catalog, trying to make a decision about the last gift he would purchase for his dear daughter, Dawn. John felt nauseated. He had made so many bad decisions in his life and this couldn’t […]