The AV system is still on, showing a YouTube video of the Vietnam Draft lottery from 1969. Slips of paper pulled from a bowl. A series of unlucky birthdays. You ask the students: do you hear your birthday? “Raise your… Continue Reading
Two summers ago, Mom and I flew to Chicago, where Aunt Cathy had lived for years. Mom’s only sibling was younger, twenty pounds lighter, single, and obsessed with cosplay. Cathy traveled to comic book conventions, Renaissance Faires, and movie premieres.… Continue Reading
I was lying in bed, wiggling my new loose tooth, when I started thinking about the Tooth Fairy. I was just trying to slide into sleep before my parents started fighting in the next room, but all of a sudden… Continue Reading
The radio coughed and sputtered. Perhaps, muttered. So many rhyming sounds in the language. The vehicle, perhaps an automobility, exhaled too. I prayed it wouldn’t expire. I needed it for two more hours. Without tunes my creative juices evaporate. It’s… Continue Reading
You promise to have my name inked on your skin someday and I say I wouldn’t ever do the same for you or for anyone at all. It is way too clichéd and the cost of having a tattoo removed… Continue Reading
I’ve held hundreds of hands. The meaty palms of a baker. The calloused knuckles of rock climbers. The peeling cuticles of mothers with teething babies. I think the woman was a waitress. The scar of a burn framed the underside… Continue Reading
I walk in. They hand me a name badge. Immediately I ask myself why am I attending my fiftieth college reunion? The few who aren’t dead look like they should be. I’m gone. No boring stories, bad food and cheap… Continue Reading
Shotgun in hand, I inch toward the contorted deer. Behind me, breath reeking of whiskey, Pa hisses, “It’s suffering, boy. Put it out of its misery.” I rest my cheek against the stock and aim the barrel at the buck,… Continue Reading
Otis poured a Scotch and flicked on the CCTV. The fight was in full flow; he could almost smell the adrenaline as punters yelled, faces red, veins bulging. He’d miss this place. He lit a cigarette, took a drag and… Continue Reading
Friday night I played another piano bar. If you’d told my younger self that all those years of practice would amount to this… Well, I probably would have been ecstatic, to be perfectly honest. But I was young and dumb… Continue Reading