A Literary Magazine
I’m in the boat, a small two-seat wooden affair without oars but one long pole, and I’m leaving for the opposite shore when I hear a whistle. People who whistle for the attention of others are almost always terrible, and I know I should push down into the mucky bottom and be done for the […]
For eleven years before it all went belly up, I worked at the American Patriot World reality park over in Middleton. For the last seven years, I was also the manager of the schoolbook depository at our second-most popular attraction, the Grassy Knoll Gun Range. We rented out rifles for any Freedom Lovers or Militiamen […]
Shadows hue his face blue as a hospital gown. He wears a denim vest, jeans torn with holes. A splotch of dried blood darkens the sidewalk. He leads me past overgrown weeds to rusted railroad tracks. Graffitied doors, broken bottles and smashed windows. An abandoned train station. He brings home girls like me, girls who […]
Ingrid took me to her favorite dive bar to the deliver the news over lukewarm beers and popcorn. “I have decided to give up red,” she announced. The way she said it, without the contraction, made her sound like a drunk trying not to sound drunk, which she occasionally was, so I ignored her and […]
Texting at the wheel, I rammed into the car in front. The sound was jaws of steel and glass, long and concertinaed. There was the wallop of car bodies – my Ford and his Merc – and then crack, split and buckle. Nobody was injured. My phone flashed. Gemma: Jake and I haven’t had sex […]
My wife is sitting at the bottom of the pool, her knees pointed upward and her arms wrapped tightly around her legs. She isn’t drowning, she just lives there. A few weeks ago, she packed up her makeup, underwear, jewelry, and medication into resealable plastic bags, adding enough rocks so that they would sink to […]
Once upon a time, when I was in about second grade, my almost-best-friend borrowed a record from her older brother’s room and I heard David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for the first time. In the song, Major Tom, an astronaut, leaves his space capsule, which then takes off for Earth without him, stranding him in space. […]
