It was a year ago this Wednesday when we woke up able to fly. It happened very naturally; I didn’t even feel it in my sleep. My friend Mick called me on the phone, and I was still groggy when I answered. “Go jump off …
They’re lacking in feeling, my children. I told them: “I don’t see any one of you feeling anything, except Jimmy.” They just looked at me. Especially Pat with his eternal resentfulness. Doesn’t like me beating him. That’s what he gets for being lazy. …
I. The night before departure in a dream I embraced a bare-chested woman who would become my wife. I kept an eye out. Conversing with seatmates on flights into Paris and Cluj: The Brazilian beauty bound for the Trans Siberian Railroad; the Russian damsel detained …
For Lijun Death by Water Let me tell you this before it is forgotten: when a whale dies at sea, it is the beginning of a festival. You must understand that this is a celebration that will last exactly a hundred years. The carcass will …
The last time I saw Michael was late at night. His grandmother had just died and he called me in a panic. He sounded hurt, confused, but not surprised. She was old, but he wasn’t ready for her to die. I asked him if he …
Merida never properly said goodbye to her parents, Alice and J.J Brenson, the way that they deserved. Joseph John, better known to everyone he has encountered as J.J., was ex-military and had married her mother at the wise age of 44. Alice, a hearty contrast …
There are services these days where one can be cremated and grown alongside a bunch of seeds. I like the idea of becoming a tree. I’d like to be a tree somewhere where trees thrive. Where they won’t be chopped down and made into hospital pamphlets. Somewhere that won’t cost you much to fly in from San Francisco. For argument’s sake I didn’t go anywhere from here and it’ll be a grand old reunion.
It went something like this: Dear Ann: I recently married a mortician. Although I had previously participated in heavy petting, technically, I was still a virgin. On our wedding night my husband told me to soak in a cold bath until my body was frigid. …
‘So, I hear that you won’t be shaving your head.’ The crack of the rusk broken into two unequal halves by hand may have awakened the dead. Spirally arranged like collapsed domino tiles on a chipped plate with blue daisies and their silver stems etched …
The slacks and sweater had to go. They made this woman in her young thirties look like a ’50s beatnik. She smiled mysteriously under her large nose. Her eyelids and eyebrows hung down at the corners, as though the laws of gravity were battling the forces of her inner enlightenment. Her otherwise even, white teeth had a distracting gap in front. But in spite of this grab-bag mixture of features, the entire package bubbled over, displaying a fusion of excitement and vivacity. Our attraction was magnetic.