Ghost Parachute

Arnie’s smelled like woman for ten months come yesterday. In that time, she hasn’t come downstairs. I bring Arnie her food four times a day, five since Charlie’s emergence, who’s oily like a vaseline covered piglet. But before oily Charlie, there was only Arnie in a state of perpetual prostration, in the bed she drips […]

“The average detainee masturbates a good seven to nine times a day. I was in federal prison for a good nine years. I would know.” I looked at my shoes instead of the clock as lectures grew stale. We were having a mock debate on whether United States treatment of detainees was morally sound. Neither […]

This is what we did. We stood over Sebastian with our protractors, compasses and Bagua, punched coordinates into calculators, scribbled not-theres and not-there-eithers. We licked thumbs and held them to the air. We found the safest, calmest space for our son and placed him there. For a pair of decades, Sebastian moored in the northeast […]

I. Portland’s nickname is Bridgetown. There are a lot of bridges. There are the old ones that everybody knows: Hawthorne, Steel, Broadway, and the like. Then there are the newer bridges. There’s a bridge made of pressure-treated wood that stretches from your middle school locker to your cubicle. There are several glinting metallic bridges that […]

The cat and I were up a tree. The cat was supposed to be on the set of Netflix’s latest paranormal romance two hours ago. In it, Phyllis, the cat’s given name, is possessed by demons, controls minds, and can fly. One of those facts would be helpful at present. When I hit the pothole, […]

They were everywhere, goats with shaggy coats and beady eyes, goats nibbling on the grass, frolicking on the front lawn, stomping on the flower beds, tugging at the tomatoes on the vines, chewing on the giant lettuce heads, wrecking the patches I’d weeded on the weekend. Goats in the yard, goats in the garden. Goats […]