Stories

Arrive to the morning team meeting twenty-three minutes late, balancing multiple aspects of your life – papers, raincoat, laptop, handbag, umbrella, breakfast, gym clothes, lunch – so that you look like a circus performer.

I was the new girl at Coltrane’s. I’d come down from Jersey for my grandfather’s stupid-ass wedding and couldn’t figure a reason to go back—Mom gone, my brothers all married and cheating, just like every guy I’d been involved with.

For days afterward Leo’s life was like a dream. He thought about Julie and Mario driving across the country. In his head they were always whooping it up. He wished them dead in the desert, their bodies black and bloated. The image so disturbed him he wished them back to life.

Bridget is in the giftware section of the department store, running her fingers over the deeply discounted snow globes, when she feels

He returns to his favorite table and trusts zoom of pen over page without stopping or reading what he writes or sweating punctuation grammar syntax or pedantic rules like when to use lie and when to use lay and boy, would he love to get laid, it’s been a long time, this dry spell he equates with the African Sahel drought from over-cropping, to ironically imply man’s rape of Big Mama Gaia!

In the next house he could see that the good professor's wife had gone up to bed. The professor himself seemed to be stalling in the kitchen, weakly filling ice trays. He kept meaning to climb over and see what happens behind the upstairs curtains, but he resisted, not wanting to risk trouble with the human police before he had a chance to complete his plans.

Lucy took the oxygen tubes out of her mother's nose and turned off the tank so they could share a last cigarette together. Marge's last cigarette. It was October 30, Mischief Night, the day her mother Marge had chosen in the hope of being buried on All Souls' Day.

It was inevitable, but all the same he hadn’t thought they would get there so soon. Not one lid would match up with one receptacle. They had reached perfect Tupperware entropy.

I went to the beach in a blindfold today, because once you asked me to. I wore the scarf you chose for me by touch: the one I wore often. The same one I told you I loved, and never mentioned the garish pattern made me cringe. Tied around my eyes, I could not see the pattern any more than you could when you chose it. It was a fitting penance.