I’ve never given a crap about cars. Just never been one of those guys, you know? Pops spent half his life away from his wives and tearing through engines, elbow deep in grease and antifreeze. He went through wives the way most people go through wrenches and it always left a bad taste in my […]
Nemi sat on her hut’s woven straw floor, peeling purple skins from shea nuts then dropping them into a bowl. Her bony, gnarled fingers, drenched in purple like withered lavender flowers, struggled with the pearl-sized fruits. Each naked shea clanked into the bowl, a sound like a raindrop on a roof’s straw. Glass mourning beads, […]
“Change your life,” the poster says. “With one simple surgery, you can live fully in the moment. No stress, no worries, no lies.” The text is accompanied by the usual images. Smiling adults, laughing children, a couple on a sunset beach walking and holding hands. That’s all, but I pick up a brochure anyway–if nothing […]
It was a wolf, rather than an ailing grandmother, that tempted Red into the woods. All day his cries echoed, small, plaintive sounding things that filled the forest. By the time she found him, night had fallen and the blood on the snow looked black. By moonlight, she pried his paw from the rusted jaws […]
Nafti bent double outside the door to his hut, coughing to catch his breath as Ilanaya labored inside. When word had reached him at the textile factory that his child’s time had come, he had left the midwife’s boy awkwardly stuttering among the scouring kiers and raced through the surviving underbrush. The parched rainforest had […]
“One final question, Cassandra. Why do you deserve to be sacrificed to the great Yog-Sothoth?” The candle on the table flickered as she studied the hooded man’s dark eyes and considered her answer. She hated when the elder gods sent a proxy. How hard was it to show up for themselves? It made her feel […]
This is going to be very quick, because I can’t tell it slowly. Just imagine you’re holding onto my hands, okay? Keep my hands in yours so that they’re not doing anything else. I had a baby in 2009. A little girl. I was going to do it the natural way, breathing techniques, nightmares about […]
Ever since Mary’s hip replacement, it was Jack’s responsibility to get the mail. Every afternoon (excepting Sundays and federal holidays), he walked down the block to the trashbox–as he called it–and sorted out the charitable requests, which he hid under his shirt then tore to bits in the bathroom so Mary wouldn’t see. Way too […]
After the grenade went off under him, they had no choice but to cut off Jon’s arm. When Jon woke, he still felt the arm’s weight, but it wasn’t there. He fell back into the cot, eyes closed, and he saw it, his arm, his left arm, dancing in a field of purple pansies. How […]
The difference between a warning and a threat is a fine one, based, near as I can tell, on choice. That is, when the girl standing over me says, Don’t move or I’ll blow your fucking head off, does she feel like she has a choice? Or is that cause and effect, like I move […]