Stories

When he bent close to her, his balaclava glowed silvery in the dying sunlight.

Was he a good man or a bad man? Was it necessary, even, to speculate?

I must tell you what it is like to be human, or you will drift away.

If I bring the wrong pen the words look like snow piles on an empty page.

I saw the glowing body, silver with time, emerge from behind a lone pine.

Her last relationship was with Elsa’s Instagram, truth be told. If Elsa is going to accept her follower invite, it needs to look believable. You did a bad thing, she thinks, and this is what you get.

“I wonder what will stay longer,” Frick said. “Me or that headstone.”

After almonds after anchovies. After baguettes, a plate of cheese.

Some night soon you’ll haul yourself out from far beneath this life.

Glad to hear the garden can be worse than being awake

Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

She’ll grow into a beauty, but she needn’t contend with that yet.

We had run out of every necessity. You name it, we didn’t have it.

I let you pull my hair, throw me to the rocks, disarrange me.

Thank goodness Dad died—sounds awful but he left his condo paid for.

Absence rarely makes the heart grow fonder, or so my mother said.

That late afternoon in the park, with its kiss, wasn’t an ending or a beginning; it was both. The piano had been a great bird rustling and swooping in the vast space.

Lunatics call it annihilation . . . Think of it as not doing a thing

A plus B; a child in peril, plus love, dissolution of, equals a story.

“You look like you’re about to fall over,” he says. “Are you all right?”

Suddenly two would dart and clasp one another belly to belly.

After my father passed away, I’d go back to stare at the cave paintings.

A powerful antidote to indifference, cynicism, and polarity.

I build our life together as I want it to be.

Evangeline thinks of the forged double-bit whistling through the air.

Imagine octopus, and keep the talk going through the chew.

Tell her I put poison in the pot and I intend to watch her drink it.

The mechanism and its crank pull us forever closer, you and I.

The walls pull apart like a troubled couple, finally deciding to hold.

I want you enough to gnash you into a silence made from pieces of silver.