Scotty is grand. It's New Year's Eve, his favorite holiday, and he's pleasantly drunk with his wife and 300 of their greatest friends at the Carlita, his favorite hotel in Paris. Its 1923, and he hasn't chosen to stay merely pleasantly drunk in quite some time, opting instead for head-to-floor blackout binges that ate up whole days of his life. He smiles wryly to see his wife, Zelda, kicking her heels up as she dances on a table in the beautiful ballroom.

He stares up at the chandelier above his head. Its gorgeous, and brand new; the last time they were in the Carlita he had noticed with some disdain a brass, plain version hanging here. Perhaps his sneer had convinced them to update it, replace it with this absolute beauty. Diamonds and crystals covered it and hung from it like icicles, catching the light from above and throwing it in every direction. If he squints, he can see things in the facets of the jewels, things that look like the future. He sees himself getting pleasantly drunk less, and blacking out more, he sees his wife's episodes getting more and more frequent, her tolerance for his blackouts waning. He sees things unraveling. Startled at his own doom-saying visions, he looks away.

Happily, he finds he doesn't care if those things lay ahead. It was 1923, soon to be 24, and everything is beautiful, his wife, his friends, the world. Next month he'd be returning to St. Louis, in the country he loved so much he had to hate it, and the month after that they'd be wintering in the Riviera, which he was eager to see. He smiles, widely, runs a small, delicate hand through his hair. He looks at the glass of champagne he's holding, feels a disturbing need to down it, and instead drops it, sending shattered shards everywhere and making the kind of mess he is expected to make on New Year's Eve. Then he kicks off his shoes and joins his wife on the table, dancing away the old year.

Labels: Stories

His fingers sank deeper and deeper into her skin, touching something intangible, smoothing her muscles, teasing apart her knots and stretching them into flexible, pliant sheets. He unwove her, and laid her out as something painless and beautiful and relaxed on his little foldout massage table, and when he was done, she didn't want him to leave, and she would have paid him by the hour to stay forever.

Labels: Stories

If I write an outraged tell-all, the best way into my memoir is to rip me off or betray me in some outlandish way. If I decide to write a career history—perhaps unlikely because I haven't picked a career outside of deck-building and successful memoir writing—the best way in would be to give me prescient advice, or provide me with a crucial contact. Perhaps the memoir will be about my family, in which case your best bet would be to be one of my parents, and to treat me horridly. These positions are mostly filled, however. Or, as is perhaps more likely, if it's a beautiful and glorious celebration of life, I'd suggest saying beautiful and glorious things to me constantly, things that will throw open the shutters of my soul, things that are at once perfectly tailored for my life and universally applicable.

Of course, the best way in, no matter what kind of memoir I end up writing, would be to sleep with me. Seriously, it doesn't matter what kind of book it is, if we have sex, I can guarantee you'll be in it, and without having to go through the trouble of thinking up glorious and beautiful things to say to me all the time. There are only three people thusly assured a spot, so there is still plenty of room. I can promise that, even if the sex isn't great, the memoir will be (whatever it will be), so consider it not a disgusting sexual act performed with a sweaty deck-builder, but as some sort of investment. An investment in your future, paid for by the chronicling of my past.

Labels: Stories

He is on the cubicle-sized balcony of his office building, taking a cigarette break. He doesn’t smoke, but he pretends to at work, in order to take cigarette breaks, which he loves. In the parking lot below him, which is bordered by a small forest of trees that always looked artificial to him. Slaloming in and out of the trees at the edge of the lot is an animal he’s never seen before. It’s cat-sized, but something about the way it walks tells him from the outset that it’s not a cat. Its step is too unsure to be a cat.

Its coat appears to be brown, but as it moves the clearly powerful muscles that lay beneath it, light catches the fur and turns it multicolored, sometimes a deep purple, then an iridescent green. He breathes in deeply and, impossibly, the animal seems to hear him with its tall, rabbit-like ears. It turns to look at him, frightened, and he sees it has a small head with a square snout, like a coyote. But its eyes are like nothing he’s ever seen, like flaming rings around an obsidian stone.

Something about this creature arouses a nearly sexual instinct in him, and he backs out of the balcony, through the kitchen, and turns and runs downstairs. He is panting and exhausted by the time he’s descended, and he bursts noisily and clumsily out of the office. There is nothing on the asphalt, more nothing between the trees. In the distance of the shaded woods, he thinks he sees a tail, like a fox’s but ringed, bouncing speedily away. Then he is alone.

Labels: Stories

You’re standing in a field of weeds, in front of a run-down plantation mansion. The door is crooked and hangs off its frame. Though a sense of dread has already started bubbling at the bottom of your stomach, you shove it inward, wood scraping wood. You climb the stairs in front of you, wooden and probably rotten—you can’t tell because they’re totally obscured by dead insects, so thick you can’t see through their dried and hollow husks. They crunch like gravel beneath your steps. But you’re still climbing.

At the top of the steps you expect to see a hallway, but there is only a small room, like an attic, although the mansion was easily three or four stories tall from the outside. In the center of the room is a small, pedestal nightstand. On it is a short letter, written in a script that is effeminate and slanting. The woman who penned it wrote poorly, you can tell, like a child, but the signature is proud and sweeping. It simply says:

Dear [your name],
Leave while you can.
Harriette Ellinger

You turn to run, you want so badly to obey this missive, but somewhere miles beneath you the door is scraping shut, and you can hear millions of legs on the stairs.

Labels: Stories

Well Diary, we have to be quite tonight because when I’m writing it is after 11 o’clock at night, and my bedtime lights out time is nine thirty. But I can’t sleep because I am to exited! This year for Christmas I got everything I wanted and many more, plus a Nintendo We to play with my daddy. My mommy bought the We for him, but he says he wants to play me at tennis, and mommy thinks I can beat him!

The most fun part of Christmas this year was I am old enough to go shopping with mommy and daddy now. I went with daddy when he went shopping for mommy and got her a necklace and a new cd by her favorite sing, and a new book by her favorite writer. And then I also got to go with mommy to shop for daddy to get him a new leather jacket, and new speakers for his stereo. They asked for my help when they were picking out presents and I got to pick things to!

It was the most exiting, fun Christmas I’ve had ever, and I’m very sad to see it go. I’ll miss our tree and our lights and our stuffed Christmas animals and the stockings, which mine is shaped like a horse. But when I got upset, mommy told me not to worry, because even if we have to hide it now, Christmas will be back next year. I can’t wait, Diary, I’m so exite I can’t even sleep!

Labels: Stories

He'd been told by a junior high school teacher that the Eskimos had over a thousand words for it. He'd learned in his freshman Intro to Linguistics class that this was a myth propagated by an incomplete understanding of the nature of synthetic languages. Two semesters later, in a General Education Anthro class, his professor used Power Point to show him how backwards it was to call them Eskimos at all.

She had never seen the snow fall. So he grabbed her hand and pulled her out into it and for a moment they stood there in the flurrying silence, his arms tucked around her and her eyes wide, straining to take it all in. And maybe the Inuit have a dozen words, and maybe they have a thousand. She didn't even have one.

Labels: Stories

MARY: Please, Jesus, it’s Christmas.

JESUS: Mary, I’m well aware of what day it is.

MARY: Don’t you “Mary” me, boy, I’m your mother!

JESUS: Mother—Mom. I know you don’t want me to leave, but I’m 18. It’s time. I waited as long as I could, for you.

MARY: Just stay a little longer. Until after the holidays.

JESUS: Mom, it doesn’t make a difference when I leave. I have to go.

MARY: It makes a difference to me! Does that matter to you? Because it damn well should. I didn’t ask for this—for you. I’ve done my best, and you know I love you, but you can’t ask me to let you leave here today. I didn’t ask for this.

JESUS (softly): Neither did I.

MARY: I know you didn’t. It’s no more fair to you than it is to me.

JESUS: But it is what must be. You know that.

MARY (sobbing): Please. Please. If you leave now, you’ll be lost to me. My child.

JESUS (takes Mary’s head in his hands, gently, as though she were his child, and kisses her softly on the forehead): I wish I could stay, Mom, but I have to go now. I have work to do.

Labels: Stories

It is a little known fact that Santa Claus is actually the world’s most notorious procrastinator. Well, it’s little known outside of the North Pole at least. There, they've all read the Claus Code, and they’re aware that Christmas is supposed to be a week-long process of toy delivery, so that on each day of that week, those not getting toys could learn about the other cultures and reflect on their similarities and differences. Instead, Santa usually watches football until Christmas Eve, when Mrs. Claus reminds him for the tenth time that, really, he’s got about two hours left to visit every house in the world, and he goes shooting out the door. To us its conquering physics that he makes it to so many houses in one night. To him, it’s no more impressive than that time you pulled an all nighter and wrote the last thirty pages of your thesis in twelve hours.

Labels: Stories

When I was a kid, in school, they told us that snow was just frozen rain, but I never believed them. A frozen drop of rain looks like a drop of water, but hard. A snowflake is a work of art, flat and soft and beautiful. Rain is only pretty in the large picture, when you look at it falling in sheets on a distant plain. But snow, snow gets more and more beautiful the closer you look at it. That’s why I don’t make my kids take an hour to get all bundled up before they go build this year’s snowman: I remember what it was like to be their age, to just want to go get as close to it as possible, to want to cover myself in it, no matter how frozen I felt.

Labels: Stories

His mother didn’t believe in God, but she believed in making him happy, so they celebrated Christmas. Every December she’d pick up an extra job, working another 10 or 15 hours a week so that she could buy him presents, and a tree. One day, after she’d put the decorations up on the 1st he asked her, “What’s so important about Christmas? What does it mean so much to you?”

She just looked at him, with tired eyes, and said, “That isn’t something I can tell you, son. It’s something we all have to find out for ourselves.”

He got angry, because it felt like she was avoiding his question, but he didn’t say anything because he was still too young for stomping out of the house. All that day and all that week, though, he thought about what she’d said.

The next week he was home watching television after school, when the news came on. The newsman was talking about how much money people were going to spend this holiday season, buying presents for themselves and other people. He talked about how important it was for the economy that everyone spend a lot. The boy turned off the television and sat, and brooded.

The next week, again he was home watching television, and the news came on again. Today the newsman was talking about how jammed all the airports and freeways were going to be, because everyone was going home for the holidays, to spend time with their families. The newsman said that family was the most important thing about the holidays. The boy, sat, and brooded, this time sad.

The next week, only a few days before Christmas, the boy was watching television again, this time during the day since he was out of school. A preacher was on TV, and he was talking about Jesus, and how Christmas was a day when everyone should remember him, and worship him. The boy listened to the preacher for a few minutes and then flipped the television off.

A few nights later, Christmas Eve, the boy sat with his mother at the kitchen table, cutting up carrots for Rudolph. She looked at him, and saw that puzzled face he made when he was thinking deeply. “Is something the matter?” she asked him.

He looked up at her. “Well mom,” he said, “I’ve just been thinking about this Christmas stuff, and I can’t make sense of it. At first they said it was all about money, but I haven’t got any money, so that can’t be why it’s important to me. Then they said it was about family, and I haven’t got any family either.” At this his mother looked hurt, and he explained quickly, “No no no, it’s not that I don’t love you or anything, just that…well, we don’t have anywhere to fly to, or anyone else to see. It’s just us, and we see each other every day.” She nodded and he went on. “Then a few days ago, this guy came on and said that Christmas was all about God, and Jesus, but we don’t believe in them, so it can’t be that that’s important either.”

She nodded and kissed her son’s head. “Go to sleep. You might still learn something. Even if you don’t, I’m proud of you for trying to figure it out.”

He kissed her goodnight, and then trotted dutifully off to bed. He woke up early, before sunrise, as he always did on Christmas, and ran out into the front room, where the presents were. He came around the corner, and saw the tree, all lit up in the darkness. He stopped.

Underneath it, there was a pile of presents, sprawled all out over the floor. Standing there, in the dark, staring at the tree, he understood. He didn’t see the presents anymore, all he saw was his mother’s hard work, all the effort and love she’d put into creating this one perfect little picture for him, even if the rest of the year was grim. And he understood.

Labels: Stories

It doesn’t snow here, but the rain is falling hard and fast, and I’m grateful. A grey Christmas isn’t as romantic or idealized or pretty as a white one, but this year my Christmas won’t be any of those things anyway, and sometimes it’s okay to want the weather to match your life. To remind you that you’re still a part of this world, no matter how alone and isolated you feel.

This is the first Christmas I’ve ever spent alone.

When I was young I had my family, then I had my friends when I went away for college, and by the time I got my PhD I had a family of my own. My wife. Now that’s all gone, my family is gone, my friends married. Good. Good for them. Who could blame them for not wanting to spend the holidays with a miserable slag? Not me. I don’t blame anyone for anything anymore.

The rain is driving. It is beating on the earth, over and over, all night. I am the rain and the earth. The thick heavy drops knock against the Christmas lights, which frame the window I sit under, the house dark except the glow from the lights that creeps through the blinds, and the faint light from the bulbs on the tree. I put the lights up for the same reason I bought the tree and decorated it, alone in our house: because it’s what we always did. And I still don’t know how to do anything else.

Labels: Stories

“Oh my God! Look at this one!” his wife shouted to him and their daughter. It was a house lit up with a hundred dollars worth of lights, covered from roof to foundation in them. It was the prettiest house they’d seen so far on that light drive. It was an old tradition of hers, started when she was just a little girl in the back of her father’s camper, cruising the suburbs of their small town. He’d been learning to love it; things between them had been bad for a while, but it was getting better. For their daughter if not each other, they were getting better.

“Oooh! Look at that!”

He looked.

Labels: Stories

The red low-riding pickup truck with a bumper sticker for the neo-thrash post-metal metal band Slay Ride is in front of you at the signal, where you’re both waiting to get across the intersection into the mall parking lot. The light turns green and the truck pulls through; as it does so, a McDonalds-and-Wendy’s thickened arm reaches out and hucks an empty fast food bag into the bushes, a gift for mother nature. The truck pulls into the lot and screeches to a halt, taking up two parking spaces.

Then a clearly diabetic ex-biker with a tobacco-stained brown beard hauls himself out. He’s overweight, and unclean. There is a look in his tired eyes as he sees your car that suggests that, even if he isn’t necessarily a pedophile, he sure wouldn’t mind having kids crawl over his body all day. He pulls a white aerosol tube of tree flocking from a pocket of his leather jacket, which he removes and drops into the truck bed with a thud. Then he closes his eyes and sprays the can at his face. You wonder if he’s huffing it before you realize his beard is turning white. Then he drops the can on the ground, where it rolls against the bottom of the truck, which is too low to allow the litter underneath.

He wipes the flocking fluid from his skin, leaving an alarmingly convincing Santa beard behind. Then, as he pulls his red velvet Santa suit out and starts squeezing into on his walk towards the mall, you put your hand on your little boy’s shoulder and ask him, “Hey, why don’t we got to your favorite candy shop at the other mall, and see if Santa visits there, too?”

Labels: Stories

Little Suzie’s favorite part of every December day was opening the little cardboard window on her advent calendar, and eating that day’s chocolate, so it caused quite a commotion when she opened that day’s window, labeled 17, and found nothing inside. Little Suzie cried and fussed, and couldn’t be consoled with ice cream or tickles or even Christmas kisses. “There’s only one thing to do,” said rookie detective Mattie McClane, Suzie’s (slightly) older brother. “I have to find out who stole little Suzie’s chocolate!” His parents, the Commissioners McClane, suspected it was an inside job, but they decided to let him proceed, to see what evidence he might turn up.

“Don’t worry, Sue,” little Mattie said. “I’ll get to the bottom of this! Nobody steals my sister’s chocolate and lives tell the tale.” He searched high and low for clues, but there were none to be found. At the conclusion of his inconclusive investigation, the Commissioners held an inquest, and accused Mattie of being the thief!

“No!” he shouted. And “I couldn’t! Not in a hundred thousand million billion years! It must have been the cat, or his fleas, or a rat, or a thief! A cat burglar, maybe!”

Commissioner Mommy scooped him up to take him to bed an hour early, planning on giving Susie his chocolate for the day to make restitution. But slung over his mother’s shoulder, the young detective detected a smudge of brown at the corner of his father’s smirk. “Wait! I’m a patsy,” shouted Mattie. “The real Christmas thief is that crooked Commissioner Daddy!”

Labels: Stories

There was something wrong, but he couldn't quite figure out what it was. Something...It was like his normal surroundings had gotten a haircut, or had their braces removed--he felt like he was looking at one small change that was throwing off the look of everything, from the Main St. shops to the gravel that crunched beneath his worn shoes. Then it hit him, not in a flash, but as a creeping, crawling realization that chilled him, even though he was walking in the sun. The realization was this: he was walking in the sun.

Even at 8 in the morning, the sun was warm, which was why he always walked on the right side of the street, so that he was shaded by the buildings that stood between he and the rising sun. But now he was warm, and in the sun, and, as usual, also on the right side of the street, walking north. Everything he did was as it normally was. The sun was rising on the wrong horizon.

He looked at the passersby and nobody seemed to have noticed. It made him a little crazy that nobody had noticed.

What the fuck? What was going on? Was the Earth moving in the wrong direction? Was the sun moving of its own accord? Maybe his vision was flipped. Maybe everything was flipped. But he no longer cared--all he cared about was how these sheep could be so blind as to NOT--FUCKING--NOTICE. He stared at them not looking, and he came, not slowly but all at once, unhinged.

Labels: Stories

Jerome had a bit pot belly and spindly little legs: it was clear to all who saw him that his spirit animal was a frog or toad of some sort, and when he walked he bounced a little, as though gravity wasn’t quite enough to hold him down, but maybe he was tethered to something. Jerome had very few friends, with 24 total friends, family, and acquaintances. It was said of Jerome that he was selective in his choices about who to associate with, but this wasn’t the case. Jerome simply preferred to only have one contact for each letter of the alphabet in his cell phone. It expedited the dialing process. But Jerome wasn’t selective; anyone with a first or last name beginning with the letters X or Z would have found him a willing and lively conversationalist from the start.

Labels: Stories

For a time, he tried to dismiss the ubiquitous presence of the red pickup truck as a byproduct of his own penchant for theatrical paranoia. But it stayed there, parked beneath his condo window. Sometimes, near sunset, he’d see a flint of something just behind the window. It looked like––what? Binoculars? Or just glasses, maybe. Then on his way to work one morning he realized the truck was tailing him, three lengths back on the 22. He started getting more than recreationally nervous; he got scared. And day after day he kept looking back and seeing it back there, hovering.

The condo he lived in was affordable to him only because its former occupant had been brutally murdered in his bathroom, and a lot of buyers had shied away from it when the local alt-weekly ran an article implying (strongly) that the condo was probably haunted. He’d bought it at a ridiculous price, but had been a bit anxious about the haunting. He wasn’t superstitious, but neither was he particularly not superstitious. Now it was getting weird, and all he could think about was the fact that they’d never caught the killer.

He tried to investigate, but every time he was sure he saw someone in the truck, he’d run downstairs and it would be empty. He wondered if maybe the truck was haunted and not his condo. Finally, a pragmatist at heart, he decided to confront the owner of the truck after it pulled out to follow him one morning, so he’d know they were in there. Except of course that was the first morning it didn’t follow him. He doubled back to check, and sure enough, it was totally empty, parked where it had been the night before.

All day at work he thought of calling the cops, but he convinced himself to settle down. But still, on the way home, he was unusually sweaty, even with the A/C on, and when he arrived home to see the truck still parked where it had been, his flesh went cold. The way a child wants to run fast and hard from the dark, that was how bad he wanted to call the cops to have them come let him into his home. But he didn’t. Dread rising in his gut, he walked up the stairs at half-speed, pausing to take a deep breath before unlocking the door.

The second he closed it behind him, he heard it, a gaspy, bubbly noise coming from the bathroom. It was a desperate noise like none he’d ever head before, halfway between laughing and sobbing. He wanted to run, but now he was caught in some kind of tractor beam, one he wondered if he had been all along. He pushed open the bathroom door. Squatting on his floor, clutching handfuls of used gum, and gum foil and wrappers he didn’t recognize, was a woman he did: the ex-tenant’s ex-wife. She’d been institutionalized months prior to his killing.

She looked up into his eyes, drool pooling on and spilling over her chapped and bloody bottom lip. She held the gum out to him. “You chew his gum,” she said, sobbing and giggling. “You chew his gum, on the toilet. Like him. The same,” she said with startling ferocity. Her eyes started going red, like she was bleeding out. “Where?” she demanded, the psychotic mirth gone from her voice, all malice now.

“Oh God,” he realized. “Nobody told her.”

Labels: Stories

Is a gift still a gift if you hate it? My gift is that I’m great––and I mean great––at eulogies. The first one I gave was for my grampa, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, until I was standing up there. Then it was like a bulb popped on, and I just started going. It was brilliant––in my whole life I’d never done any single thing that well, which is how I knew it wasn’t really me, it was something speaking through me. I had my crowd laughing, crying. I just flat out had them.

Labels: Stories

Cyndy was pleased: the party had gone swimmingly, and she’d managed to hold it in all night. Cyndy was a corporate ladder climber of the first rate, and a friend of hers (who was also a lawyer) told her that hosting a party for the company at her penthouse could help her move up a whole rung in one night. When the newest issue of FBJ (Female Business Journal) confirmed it, Cyndy had begun planning immediately. Sure enough, the partners were immensely pleased, the people she was climbing above bitterly jealous, though of course they publicly accepted their invitations graciously.

From there the whole affair came off quite effortlessly. The caterers she was referred to by her friend, the decorations her mother and aunt helped with, since her home was a sparse and lonely place. She even had the caterers provide wait service—it was like an expensive company party, but arrange and hosted entirely by her. It was perfect…except that she almost ruined it completely.

Every spare inch of penthouse was in use, and she couldn’t risk ducking into the bathroom or patio in case someone heard. She snuck into the hallways, but people were coming and going so often that she had to pretend she was just there to greet and bid farewells. It wasn’t until the last guest had left and she’d locked up that she took a deep breath and let it rip. It was the second biggest fart of her entire life.

Labels: Stories

Sometimes I think I would make a great superhero. I mean I think I could really change the world, really do all the things society needs but the governmental flunkies can’t get done. Like, look: here’s one I thought up today. I’d ride a bike, maybe, or some sort of high-tech modified car shaped like a stork or something. Maybe it’d fly. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. The important part of the whole operation would be this giant basket that I’d carry with me whenever I went out on patrol. And I’d find one of those moms whose babies are just crying and screaming their hearts out and their faces are all red and wet and the moms are just patting them on the backs or shoving bottles in their faces. Clearly not fit. And then I’d ride up (or drive by, depending. Maybe I’d make it so I ran really fast) and I’d snatch the baby, put it in the basket, and book it out of there, on to the next case. And once I had a good basketful, I’d drop them off on the doorstep of someone who gets paid to stop kids from crying. A nun or a nanny or something. And maybe I’d put a note on the basket that says something like “Special Delivery from The Stork” or whatever. Not that I’d want the key to the city or anything like that, but just so they knew someone was out there, looking out for the babies of the city. Or something like that. I don’t know.

Labels: Stories

PING!

She knew life was only meant to come around once––she was trying to get it right.

PING!

But here she was, doing corporate graphic design, like she swore she never would.

PING!

She wanted to paint visions that would hang in museums for centuries.

PING!

Instead, she was cramming the words of fat white executives into their corporate newsletters for them.

PING!

She’d tried, really, to get it right. She sold all her stuff, moved to New York, spent three years making all the right friends, the arty friends, and then she found out that nobody like her stuff. She’d been painting since she was three, and nobody liked it.

PING!

This, she thought, is America, where your dreams are supposed to come true when you sell all your shit and move across the country to chase them.

PING!

So she got this job to pay the bills and

PING!

lost all her arty friends who came to hate her for doing corporate work and now she has to hear this god-awful

PING!

every time someone opens the door because the doorframe of this otherwise hermetically sealed Tupperware jar of an office is to small and

PING!

she fucking hates it, it and herself.

…

…

PING!

Labels: Stories

Cortland had been staring at the bike for about five minutes, dumbstruck. Here, not four blocks from his house, was the red, dinged up bike he’d been riding for the last decade. The bike had been stolen two weeks prior, and Cortland was experiencing, for the first time, the sensation that only comes when you are really and truly dumbstruck, so much so that you can’t move or speak. Until, that is, the short, brawny, thick-necked man walked out of the drug store and hopped on the bike. Cortland was surprised by how badly he wanted to not say anything, but…he couldn’t. He grabbed the guy by his shoulder and nearly tipped him over sideways onto the ground. “Hey man!” he shouted. “That’s my bike!”

The man climbed off and turned around to look at him, clearly stunned himself. “How stupid do you have to be to ride a bike three blocks from where you stole it? Are you a fucking moron?”

The man blinked thrice, stupidly. “I’m taking this bike back,” Cortland said, sure of himself now. He wondered if maybe the guy didn’t speak English, or if he was a mute. The man took a step back, and Cortland hopped onto the seat, pedaling away. He was smiling: he had righted a wrong. And, more satisfying, it was a wrong that had been done to him. It wasn’t until he’d made it all three blocks home that he realized the seat was lumpier than he remembered it ever being, and the handles were oddly squishy. He’d never ridden this bike before in his life.

Labels: Stories

My head is a snot bubble filled with concrete, too thick for any air, thought, or emotion to penetrate or escape it. Nothing goes in or out, and its density makes it serve as a poor conductor of energy, motivation, or willpower of any kind.

My head is a snot bubble filled with cotton: dry, tasteless cotton that plugs everything and makes you gag with the consistency of its inconsistence. In between the cotton are pockets of explosive gas, which sometimes looks like coughs and sometimes looks like farts.

My head is a snot bubble filled with bees, smog, hard water, mineral deposits, rust, scabs, rashes, whooping coughs, hatred, a Petri dish swimming with evil, and malevolent (not passive) intolerance.

My head is a snot bubble filled with snot.

Labels: Stories

I urge you to click on the link over there on the right and subscribe to the podcast. There's a new episode up, and it's a damn goodie too, in which I break down how Long Beach could pay for an NFL stadium without spending too much public dough, and Jayj and I mercilessly mock Zoomy for being such a rusty piece of rust. Long Beach Sports Night...Right now!

Labels: Generalness

Friday morning and the rain is coming down harder than you’d expect in this party of the country. A thousand miles north it’s coming down so hard that it’s causing some of the words floods in national history and it seems odd that there’s so little coverage of it––maybe because we’re over floods this year. This year wildfires are in. The cars on the street and in the parking lot are glistening and glowing now, like heavenly, dewed, bejeweled creatures.

Friday morning and the world is turning so fast it seems like it’s standing still, and established science or no, it’s awfully hard to believe the sun isn’t orbiting around us. From up there, we look so petty, building tiny weapons to destroy huge tracts of realty over invisible ideas. We must look like warring ants, or fleas from up there. Or children who’ve been left alone too long.

Friday morning and America is rising with the sun, rolling on her nylons and squeezing into her heels, and she’s in her sedan and she’s in line on the 405, and she’s listening to Johnny Cash on the radio with one ear and the rain with the other, and she sees us all around her on the freeway and she smiles and she doesn’t mind, and we smile back and don’t mind, because everyone is staying up late tonight, and not getting up until Saturday afternoon.

Labels: Stories

“Okay, I have a weirder one than that. Listen: I used to work with this woman whose daughter has the strangest medical condition I’ve ever heard of. She would––how do I put this? She would get stuck inside of things, like books, or movies. Or paintings. That’s how her parents found out about it, they were in a museum and their little girl was staring up at this beautiful landscape, staring at it like she was in love with it, her eyes all faraway and her mouth hanging open. Her mother turned to get her father’s attention, to show him how precocious their little girl was. Then there was this POP, and she turned around, and her daughter was in the painting. Took her hours to get her to come back out.

“Sometimes she wouldn’t come out for days at a time; one time they actually had to cut her out from between the words of her favorite book when she’d been in there for nearly a month. They dropped bread crumbs and jam down between the pages to make sure she stayed fed. One time she even brought in a painting her daughter was stuck in because her husband had to work that day, too, and they didn’t want to leave the painting on their wall in case she popped out halfway through the day and ended up home all alone.

“It was the damndest thing, too, but when I looked at the girl, in there among the reeds, painted in exactly the same style as them, I wanted to be there too. But think about it: if you got into your favorite story, on screen or in print, would you ever want to come out?”

Labels: Stories

The first time I saw him go by, I thought he was committing suicide; I live in a suite in one of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers, so believe it or not, I have seen a few guys go past the window. But they were flailing, screaming; no matter how depressed someone is, once they throw themselves off, they always wish they hadn’t. Not this guy; he was shooting down like a bullet, and he was dressed completely in black. It wasn’t until he was hauling himself back up that I realized he’d been holding someone, and that the man clinging to him was sobbing. Then they went by again, and this time, on the way up, the man was telling him all about the details of a weapons deal happening later that night.

It wasn’t until the next day, when I read that Chicago’s very own vigilante, The Night, had broken up a weapons shipment that I understood what happened. From then on, I started watching for him: he went rushing by holding some thug another four times that year, and each time I saw him, heard the soft thwapping of his black coat as it rushed downward, I was thrilled. My heart started racing, I felt all excited and nervous like I was about to meet a blind date or something. He never went by when my downstairs neighbor was home, thank God, because that guy wouldn’t hesitate to sell him out. But not me: I’d rather feel safe at night then make a fast thousand bucks.

Labels: Stories

He was tired of bathing. So he stood up, watching himself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror he’d installed when he moved in. The foam bubbles from his bath clung to him in patches. He giggled and decided he looked like a pirate Santa Claus. He pointed at the mirror accusingly and said, “Arrr, here’s your loot, mateys!” He threw on his velour pants and sat down to watch a cartoon marathon. Halfway through only the first episode, his girlfriend came in to break up with him, muting the television. He tried to keep a straight face, but as he watched a long tendril of snot bounce like a bungee from the bottom of her nose, all he wanted to do was burst out laughing. Finally she left.

“Well,” he said, patting Tabby the tabby, his most stalwart companion. “That was odd.” It had been nearly six months since last time she’d broken up with him, and he’d been pretty sure she’d broken herself of the habit. He unmuted the TV and sat down to watch the rest of the marathon.

Labels: Stories

She was tired of pretending. After two years, she was tired of a lot. She was tired of the way he scratched his ear and stuck out his tongue while he figured out the electricity bill. The smell of his socked feet made her weary, and his brash whistling filled their little apartment like an oppressive, colorless, tuneless gas. She woke up in the morning exhausted from shying away during the night, and she collapsed into bed pale and weak from the constant struggle to hide her revulsion and pretend that she still cared. That there was something left of the girl who had fallen so completely for his promises of bliss. Now, she was too tired to go on. Sobbing, she told him so. She packed up her books and her computer and her faded jeans and said goodbye to him as he stared numbly from the kitchen. She left the key and locked the door behind her.

“Well!” he said to the large tabby cat with whom he shared his studio loft. “That was odd.” Whistling, he pulled their dinner from the cupboard and took the TV off mute.

Labels: Stories

John the cashier stands about six foot two of pale, drawn skin, his face gaunt and sunken. He leans crookedly when he stands, waiting for the next customer, as though he hasn’t figured out how to stand up straight, as though maybe when he was a kid nobody bothered to teach him. John the cashier is alone, always, whether he’s working or at home, alone, and he wonders whether one day his neighbors will talk about him on the news and say, “He was quiet and he kept to himself” and he doesn’t care if you get tired of his name because it’s the only thing he has.

John the cashier wants this new customer, this customer who is paying him right now, the way a drowning man wants a drink. He wants to touch him, or smell him, or just be close enough to feel the redeeming heat of his skin against his own quivering and alien flesh. The man is walking away. John the cashier is watching his hand, where he holds his receipt. He is crumpling it, and John the cashier wants him to drop the crumpled, sweaty receipt in the trash so he can root through it after closing, so he can press the thin paper to his forehead, so he can smell its carbon-and-sweat smell. John the cashier wants this literally more than he wants to be alive.

Labels: Stories

The Advent Calendar makes its big debut today, as do thousands of Christmas trees, Christmas lights, Christmas decorations, Christmas shoppers, Christmas songs, Christmas haters, and even a few non-denominational snowmen. Snow has seen fit to fall all the way from the sky just to land on the ground, and pile up and cover everything, and because it’s December 1st, this seems magical instead of like a huge inconvenience to commuters who have to chain their tires now. Happiest of all the critters and creatures celebrating this Christmas, though, is Coxy the Cat, who is curled up cozily under the tree, twitching her whiskers sporadically in her sleep, and occasionally twitching hard enough to bump a present over a few inches. When she wakes up, she’ll bat at the lowest ornaments, hung just for her, and then she’ll fall back asleep…maybe over there on the other side of the tree. It looks comfy there.

Labels: Stories