Ghost Parachute

The delights were out again digging their fingers into the grooves in the bark of the trees, licking their lips with grubby tongues. They had been lurking at the edge of the woods for days, whispering, rustling, causing frenzy among the blackbirds. Now, they were on the move. The fuzzy shapes of them darted from […]

The altar boy comes along the railing, gold communion plate steady in his hand.  His blond hair falls to his eyebrows. It’s longer than what most clean-cut boys wear, those who, when they aren’t in church, hang around the school cafeteria in short-sleeve plaid shirts and khaki pants, but he’s in with that group, an […]

Stan’s style is to prowl the warren of two-tops. That first night, he’d stopped at Harriet. Made puppy eyes and called her sweetheart, like an old vaudevillian. She saw his naked need to charm. Stan earns no money as a stand-up comic. In fact, it costs him twenty bucks a night to meet the Yuck […]

She’s six with a coin slot smile, strawberry blonde going sepia in the picture still hanging on sepia paneling. She’s me on a birthday bike, all pink and mint and pedaling away. She’s me imagining she’s picking up enough speed to pull a bedraggled kite behind her. By god does she work at it. Pepaw […]

I had four legs and a bad eye when she found me in the woods behind the barn, abandoned, my front leg caught in a trap she had not set. The vet took the leg, and my wife carried me home in a box. The girls recognized me first. “That’s what you get for killing […]

It came again last night, that awful dream I get about the airplane. This time it crashed in the middle of London, god knows why, maybe I saw a show on TV that made me think of it. Anyway, it wasn’t out in a flat desert like usual. This time I was high up in […]