I’m lost in numb daydreams, gazing at lush oak trees. Craving more, I squint through the leaves and branches.
I hesitated to tell the tattooed counterman at Good Eats he had a body odor problem.
The acid makes it hard to count the ravers. Hundreds? Thousands?
The cries rise to a crescendo just as the casket is lowered into a pit. A chorus breaks out in lament against a stifling air heavy with the scent of grief.
The rain had been incessant and biblical for days and weeks and nearing a month.
I am a block of marble, heavy and stuck as I watch Melinda throw Becky’s extra-large underwear outside. Night swallows them. Melinda jeers.
I sat opposite my wife, but this was not the date I had planned. This had become hostile, confrontational.
I sneak the empty beer cans out to the recycling bin; lifting up some cardboard and the worst drawings the kids made, I hide the cans, evidence I'm not doing as well as it seems.
I end the Viber call after my psychiatrist diagnoses me with anxiety disorder, before hopping inside the shower, where I let the water drain everything that’s left of me. CW: Sexual Abuse
Here she was, waiting for the guy she swiped right on, who responded in kind. Neither believed an app existed for the non-able-bodied starving for physical contact.
My son picks a dandelion, standing head-and-shoulders proud above the grass around it, and blows. “I want to be a dinosaur,” he says.
My first day came two weeks in. They had already shaken off their summer laze by the time I was being introduced, wearing hand-me-downs from someone else’s long time ago.
He was pale, gothed up, and fanged as usual when we stopped by Target for some black hair ties.
She didn’t need fangs, and a cross wouldn’t have kept her away, only an unpaid co-pay.
When I told her my secret, she promised not to tell anyone, so the surprise was fierce when we were all in the car a few days later and, out of the blue, she announced it.
I took my coffee to the porch overlooking the Strait of Belle Isle in northern Newfoundland. The early morning fog lifted to the sound of gulls, crows, and a fox sparrow.
My right thumb pressed the button again to release more morphine. Covered in tubes and needles, surrounded by sounds generating persistent resonant vibration in the head, I shifted between states of consciousness …
She doesn’t have long. Has a finite time to search while her son’s surgeon does his best or, possibly, his worst.
I had never been to a real wedding before. My new wife’s mother rose, clinked her glass with her spoon, and made charming remarks.
The back of our tour bus hung out over the edge of a cliff on a narrow mountain road in northern India, in the pouring rain.