The Meal It had started to snow and I tucked myself between two towering brownstones. I pulled my knees to my chest and rested my chin on my knobby kneecaps. My shoes had holes in them and my jeans were starting to thin and tear in places. I pulled the knit cap I found yesterday
By Gone The old woman sat alone in her rocking chair stroking her half blind tabby cat, both of them reminiscing of younger days long gone by. Her family had left nearly an hour ago, tuckered out from the celebration of two milestones for her, not only was she 85 today, but this would have
Nora’s RV Nora had always been the responsible one in their household—hers and Joe’s—but her sense of duty took on a new dimension this Tuesday morning, an inflated desire to nurture and protect and upkeep. She rubbed her face and got out of bed. She made breakfast for Joe and bundled him off to work.
Snake Eyes The black racer, a good eight feet long, had gotten tangled in the plastic deer netting he’d put up last winter to try to save the arborvitaes. He knelt down close to it, stared at its small, lifeless fist of a skull. Its eyes and mouth were wispy slits and its coiled middle
Ugly Monster There is no comfortable peer group for monster. The etymology of her name is from mono, as in monotone, monopoly, monotheism—one.
Of each monster, there is only one.
When she is little, monster gives herself pet names like honey and sweetheart but she doesn’t tell them to anybody. She does not write her
Genderflection Dmitry Yevovka, the great Russian nihilist, once wrote that women are inherently weak and do not possess the moral stamina to love more than one man at a time; his wife, Marfa Ignorovka, proved otherwise. In a letter immediately following Dmitry’s exile, Marfa confessed to her long-standing, extramarital affair with his brother, Pyotr and
No Parking When Jerry pulled up to the apartment, there was already a car parked in the driveway. It was a new car, or at least a newer model, a re-worked throwback to the muscle cars of the 70’s. He knew it was none of the neighbors; they never parked in his spot. He’d bought
The Cause For years we have been coming down to the black market. Dressed in our best middle class clothes, we hang out on the corner opposite and watch as the mixture of lumpenproletariat and crested rich intermingle while bidding small sums for thimblefuls of illegality.
Bag ladies and trophy wives momentarily match wits over
Dark Tricks Peeto stood at the brass rail that ran the full length of the Haymarket Bar’s north wall on a floor-to-ceiling glittered mirror. A dozen other young hustlers joined him on the rail, and most faced the bar and the dwindling prospects for work that night. But Peeto stood with his back to the
Snoopy Time
“I’m so proud of you, baby. Always going to school early to do your homework.” Mom hugged me tight. I smiled and said ‘See you later.’ I envisioned that loving hug of hers compressing into locked fingers around my throat when she got my report card at the end of the semester.
