Monday morning 5 train’s long tunnel to Brooklyn. The commuters’ glum affect reflects the drudge of a new work week.
Monday morning 5 train’s long tunnel to Brooklyn. The commuters’ glum affect reflects the drudge of a new work week.
Walking the shoreline, I observe how the wind behaves—like a relentless, fussy mother, scouring footprints, scrubbing the sand smooth, only to have the tide return …
I refused to look around me, didn’t want to see, but the piles of roadside logs couldn’t be ignored.
Chop, a hunk of hair. The scissors flashed as I grabbed heavy handfuls and cut it down to the scalp.
How long has he been watching me? This is what I wonder when I spot him too few paces away, peering at me through a tangle of branches.
I was resigned to the misery until the epiphany. It came while heading to Canada, and my Road to Damascus was the New Jersey Turnpike.
“Rock, scissors, paper, shoot!” His tiny hand forms a fist which I tenderly enclose within my own, wishing as I do that I’ll never have to let it go.
I race towards home, holding up the watercolour I painted at school.
When we get to the waiting room, our lucky seats are taken. We end up beside a talker.
Everyone remembers the first time they heard a man beg. “Let go,” he said.
A burnt orange glow reflected on our cheeks, the fire warming air more accustomed to the winter chill.
The wet snow in the woods forces me to run on the road this morning.
That dang pickup is still there, has been since I left work. Lane-changing when I lane-change, that’s how I know he’s tailing me.
He says it never happened. The airport, his arms dangling me over the railing.
They think it's the paint. They think I'm crazy.
I saw a couple heatedly arguing at the edge of the road in front of a tucked-away apartment complex, and then he pushed her into the road and moved back towards her.
After stumbling across the gangway at Frankfurt during a layover, I’m suddenly in a heart-racing haze at security, an officer observing my disoriented self, swabbing my belongings for “substances.”
Mom was in the ICU for three weeks. The doctor suggested moving her to hospice.
Spiralling, up, up, my anxiety levels. Sweat, hot, dances down my back.
The heavy bass resonates in the bathroom, the vocals barely audible over the running water.