Shadows
I’m going to tell you a story. It’s about a long winding staircase, a long winding staircase into darkness. Thick darkness. You will have to step carefully, feeling each step beneath you with your foot, with your toes, to make sure it’s there, to make sure you aren’t...
Season of the Witch
I have this friend. A writer of pretty good prose and godawful poetry (which even he would admit) A playwright in remission with the dramatic impulse re-emerging (he's always been a drama queen) And my friend? He has this little problem. Every October, he wants to write...
There is no moral
She saw the cottage from a long way off, and wondered if this was a bad sign: if she could see it, other things could too. But it offered shelter. If offered protection. Maybe there would be something inside to use as a weapon. She ran. Ran over uneven forest...
Victor's Prayer
The back door of my apartment opens into an alleyway covered in murals. On weekends, people flock to this urban tourist attraction, cameras at the ready. They photograph one another posing against the vivid colors, hoping to get an ‘original’ shot of the graffiti so many...
Soluble
I knew about the wallet.
The wallet had been there for years, just inside the door, in a drawer nobody much used. There was a key drawer above it, but underneath was the stuck drawer, and in it was the wallet, and in the wallet was $2, 627. I knew about that. ...
Editing the Dead
Okay, this is how James died. He and his wife Annie, who never really liked me but we tried to get along because we knew he couldn’t choose between us, were on a trip to Spain. They take trips all the time, and I’m incredibly jealous. James is an intellectual property...
Baby Alligator
A man walks into a bar. It sounds like a joke, I know. A man walks into a bar with a white plastic bucket. No one recognized him. Andrea the Chilean waitress leaned in and said to me, “That man, he looks like a real scum bucket,” and I laughed and wished she would say it...
