I used to wash dishes at an upscale restaurant. The type of place where the help was supposed to stay hidden from the customers in case our existence would offend them. The restaurant resided next to a river that was… Continue Reading
Morning — it’s coffee and medication before thieving time from the new day. Albert shakes pills in his left hand like dice and looks out of the kitchen window to a yellow carpet of ginkgo leaves rimed with the first… Continue Reading
Doctor Linda Torres had convinced the public that a meteor large enough to dwarf the one that had killed the dinosaurs was headed towards Earth. Yes, it was a lie of apocalyptic proportions, but it was a necessary one. Humanity… Continue Reading
April 30th, 1972 I came home. It wasn’t the warm welcome that I had expected. What I expected was the abundance of romance and cheering that my father had told me about after he returned home from Germany at the… Continue Reading
Daisy is an orange blob like me, like everyone we know, like everyone in our territory. We don’t know anyone who isn’t an orange blob, but we’ve heard that green blobs have entered other parts of the territory. I am… Continue Reading
The substitute teacher only tells us Miss Rawley is having a difficult time, but we already know why. Fifth grade is a room full of rumors, and we are sure this one is true. We’ve watched the video news clip… Continue Reading
My mother-in-law is a riot. Our first time in New York together, she goes to see the landlord about the rapidly fading battery in the automated door lock and comes back with a date. She makes and consumes coffee late… Continue Reading
The Source crawls through code, examining and discarding ones and zeros until it finds the rogue defrag program nibbling away at bandwidth. A hidden cache of photos exists on an obsolete server that should have been destroyed during the last… Continue Reading
“Join hands for prayers,” said Grandma Mercy. Little Thomas cringed. He hated saying prayers before meals, especially in public. Worse, the server had put the steaming pepperoni pizza with extra cheese right under his nose. How could anyone pray with… Continue Reading
It’s not easy being in love when you’re undead. I mean, this definitely isn’t the afterlife I would have chosen for myself. If I had the choice, I’d still be living and breathing and sitting in AP Calc next to… Continue Reading