Arturo is in the Resistance. Of course, it isn’t called the Resistance. It isn’t called anything. One cannot speak of the Resistance because one never knows who is listening, whom to trust, who else belongs.
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Steven stands outside his engagement party at his future in-laws’ beach house, headphones jammed in his ears, smoking a joint to calm himself before going back inside.
Read MoreTo the sailors in the bleachers, the stain inching from Angelo Poffo’s flanks resembled a pair of dark, sticky wings. The rhythm, the friction, had husked the skin off his lower back. By the third hour, eight fingers laced under his head had fused together. A medic offstage twirled a scalpel in the flame of a Navy-issued Zippo.
Read MoreAt the team’s first practice, the new coach says, “Can I see you in my office?”
“I don’t know,” Amber says. “Can you?”
He has a room waiting for them at the Red Carpet Inn under a fake name. At the front desk, she will tell them she’s his daughter, there to pick up the room key her dad has left for her.
Read MoreMy cousin Stephanie, only four months older than me but always the first to do everything, has a boyfriend. This boyfriend lives in a neighborhood so lush and green that when they walk the sidewalks at night, the two of them passing a cigarette back and forth (she’s the first to smoke too), she imagines they are lightning bugs in a forest.
Read MoreHe said it was to absorb my power. The way they talk about cannibals in the movies. He said it was because he had a hole inside him that he stuffed and stuffed, but could never fill. I told him we all have holes and he said he knew it and it didn’t matter what I thought as he started with a toe, which I thought was unwise.
Read MoreA fortune-teller told me I had drowned myself in a previous life in Ancient China. Apparently my parents had arranged for me to marry a rich but old government official and, in absolute protest, my past self found a fast-moving river and jumped in, defiantly thinking Don’t you tell me what to do as I succumbed to the cold torrents.
Read MoreWhenever my mother had a migraine, she had us write a list of things we were afraid of on yellow legal pads. When we finished we pushed them under her locked bedroom door. My younger sister, Lesley (she had me call her Lola), who acted like my older sister, could crank out a list in sixty seconds flat. I cheated off her list sometimes.
Read MoreMy father was a bell maker. Bells of all sizes crowded his workspace, rows of molded crowns. Curved shoulders ranged across oiled parchment. The yokes, scrolled oak or simpler design, were fitted to the bell bodies, sonorous clappers tested repeatedly for the best sound.
Read MoreI am eleven turning twelve and I’m convinced Patti Smith is my mother and secretly lives in my neighborhood. I live in a town called Smithtown. This is only part of the reason I think Patti lives here.
Read More“Passing” was the verb we employed to describe the act of traveling to the other side. Passing was a thrill, a gorgeous kind of terror held within tight bounds. Permission to look at another world, one frightful and uncharted, all the while tethered safely to our own by seat belts and vigilant adults anchored to steering wheels.
Read MoreNAME: Niebyl, Owen
POSITION: Bus Driver
SCHOOL(S) SERVED: San Dieguito Union High School District
Read MoreIt wasn’t Alicia’s catechism teacher, her mother, or even her sister who taught Alicia the truth about God’s grace and the redemptive power of skin robes. It was her stepfather, Larry McBride.
Read MoreWhen I was young and gawky I rode a bicycle everywhere I went and defaulted to happiness. In spite of midnight beatings for breaking my glasses, the threat of nuclear war, and revelations about the specter of a silent spring, my disposition remained relentlessly sunny.
Read MoreThere’s an animal outside my window. It’s looking at me. I was just doing nothing here at the kitchen table, scrolling through shit on my phone, trying to beat this insomnia, crying again for some unknown reason, and then HEY!
Read MoreOn her first day of her new job a man wearing a kilt and smoking a cigarette showed Isobel Bennett to her cubicle. She briefly fantasized she was being recruited by the C.I.A., but it was probably some sort of not-for-profit. She didn’t care what they did as long as it wasn’t a scam.
Read MoreOf the dozen buildings slouched riverward in Near Haven shipyard, only Stearns Fiberglass let on that it might be occupied. The bait company, canvas supply, machine shops, and all else sat dark under their corrugated aluminum roofs, while at Stearns a floodlight watched the empty yard and a dull blue flicker lit the windows.
Read MoreNo one does what he does. No one does what he does where he does it or within the sound of his shouting voice. No one does for anyone what he does for everyone who wants him to do it. No one.
Read MoreEmmeline felt it finally, that wonderful expansion that came with a couple drinks. The spaces between her words. The width of her smile. She felt it all, along with the gaze of the man on the other side of the yard, looking down his beer bottle at her as he drank.
Read MoreLife was better before I could Speak with Dead. When I could only Cure Light Wounds once, twice a day? Those were the best times. Little miracles. That’s where it’s at.
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