(mac)ro(mic)

I had left the key in the same spot until just now.  You had to drag the little tiki guy from the garden and use it as a stepstool. Looks like Sean Penn was your first impression. I told you that you got it all […]

Sister Nancy calls me Larry David. True. I strive to violate arbitrary norms, like Curb Your Enthusiasm. Nancy often asks how I am, expecting a simple, I’m good. I’m shitty.  How does one expect me to hide my feelings? Especially Nancy, who once said the […]

The moon barks its commands through its pale light, his body animating out of slumber and into full stalking mode. He sits up, slowly turns his head to the left, to the right, like the Terminator. Like all great things predatorial. He’s doing it again. […]

For one blissful second, as Eddie’s soles lost contact with the glassy ice of the pond, he believed that dying might be like this. But as his head smacked the ice and his sister’s sobs overcame the dull reverberation of impact in his skull, he […]

Jeremy left the plasma center with his arm wrapped and forty bucks on his debit card. On the walk to the library, he stopped and bought some malt liquor and a pack of smokes. He sat on the steps and drank, his thoughts on his […]

Start at the very beginning. Write what you know. That was the only advice Natalie’s professor offered her when they met yesterday to discuss her term paper. It had been snowing all day long; white showers had piled up, covering every possible surface. Some people […]

When I jerk awake, it’s still dark, my wife deep asleep beside me. I have a terrible stiff neck, and I think I can detect a lingering smell of blood. I had just dreamed that I had been sentenced to death by decapitation for an […]

Mother and I hide in the bathroom. Dad yells outside the window each night. Calls Mother a social criminal. A dreamer. He’ll make me a fighter. Some nights he fires his guns. Never blasts the windows. Just blasts into the air. We’ve been camped out […]

1. Now It’s noon on Sunday. You stand on your front porch, frozen, staring in disbelief at the schoolyard across the street from your house. The entire mangled front end of a car is in the air, its underbelly propped against the chain link fence […]

Rushing through the mall on your lunch hour, you spot Joanie in the food court. How long’s it been? Two years? Three? She looks the same. Well, maybe a little sloppier. She’s got on sweats and a baseball hat, her hair gathered into a messy […]

The area beyond the bridge is said to be haunted: where the fallen red leaves halt at the bank and a short, flat rectangular piece of concrete extends over a rivulet–barely even an arm’s length above water. Teal balustrades cage the bridge in, the posts […]

On hot Sundays, I often think of the Tourist Park in Ste. Anne. Their new concrete pool was a cube punched into the grass and filled to the white-tiled rim, the water mirror bright. With our family bakery twenty miles distant—dark, quiet, and still—Dad would […]