I meet Angel by the metal payphone outside 7-11. I stroll outside with my breakfast, a giant-sized blueberry Slurpee. It is a sugared oasis from the cod I slice and fry and serve and, after my shift ends, the cod I steal from the food court.
Read MoreATV stands for all-terrain vehicle stands for Tilley Baker circa 2007 stands for eighteen years old stands for captain of the soccer team stands for seat straddled by the operator stands for low pressure tires stands for around 6:30 at night stands for dusk stands for off road escape stands for farm access road stands for chain across a farm access road …
Read MoreThe graveyard is full of music and movies, a field of dead grass scattered with headstones made from vinyl sleeves and DVD cases, but this is the first short story you’ve put in the ground. The first book to mark a tomb.
Read MoreThe conversation turns to cockroaches, which Francine has a mortal fear of. When earlier she walked into the kitchen of the bar Anna and Yeorgos had just signed a lease on, she let out an almighty shriek. Dead cockroaches everywhere. The place had sat empty for two years, so no wonder. There were more in the bathrooms.
Read MoreA little purple wildflower that waits for me beneath the helmet on his motorcycle seat the first time he picks me up. The ride we catch later back to town with a man who calls himself Little Bear after we lose the keys to the motorcycle. The smell of fake pine and musty cigarettes that emanates from the upholstery while I am pressed between men I hardly know.
Read MoreWe're in the dining room, sitting around a big wooden table with heavy legs, meant for a family to gather around it and break bread. We are a family, I think, in some ways. There are six of us, seven, eight, and the room is filled with our voices. I’m sitting on his knee. He rests his heavy head on my shoulder and talks around me.
Read MoreAt what point in fame-dom is it no longer acceptable to go to the Cheesecake Factory for a fancy dinner? This is not a reference to kink culture. By fame-dom (second syllable pro-nounced like dumb), I mean how famous can you be and still deem a chain restaurant upscale. And by famous, I don’t just mean actresses and musicians. I mean CEO’s of local nonprofits, cat whisperers, professors, and public servants, from street sweeper to Justice Antonin Scalia.
Read MoreIt was when the Division of Family Services took us away from our mother that I became my mother and a thousand mothers, all lined up against the wall to be shot in the head.
Read MoreI see him every morning now. Who? you ask. Well no one you would know. Just a boy who turns to smile at me before he stretches taut his bow, ready to kill the lion in the shadows. The lion that would kill me if the boy didn’t kill him first, the only lion in all existence. The rest are mere mirages.
Read MoreIt was cold in the way that only Iceland can be cold. The houses in Iceland aren’t made of wood. It’s a volcanic island and therefore all the buildings need to be built to a certain code, to withstand, I guess, volcanos and other seismic activity. So the houses are stone and concrete and it is cold ten months out of the year.
Read MoreWe began, by fifth grade, to establish a pecking order.
I was gullible—they convinced me once to shave my legs and arms. I dragged my mother’s pink razor from ankle to knee, then wrist to elbow. It was slow going, because each hairless furrow required careful examination.
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A short film essay by John Bresland, with a synopsis and review by Michael J. Soloway.
“Once upon a time I drove a very fast car,” are John Bresland’s first words of narration in his short video essay, “The Seinfeld Analog.” From this innocent opening to innocence shattered.
Read MoreA delivery man came today with a cardboard box. On the outside it says "Handle With Care," "Fragile,” "Do Not Drop." The packing slip says 1 lb. I've never opened a package so carefully. Inside is a shiny wooden box with Azul engraved in gold. My best friend, my 12 year old dog-- my greatest bond-- in a box.
Read MoreI could have been forty-something myself and it would have all seemed normal. This is her new normal and so it is mine. She is practicing for a contest and I want to hide. The brown suede sectional in the living room is disassembled and stacked in a corner, like puzzle pieces fresh from the box. My sister sits on its cushions and watches. I am to be part of the act.
Read MoreThe men I dated when I was 19 and 20 have no names. They used to have faces, but I’m losing them. I can no longer remember lips, hands, chests. I have no pictures, no court-admissible evidence they existed. These men have blurred into one foggy presence, one whose dating routine was shared across the board.
Read MoreMaria, the black-eyed, reticent waitress who’d managed to keep herself alienated from the rest of the staff at my restaurant months after she started working there, liked her nails done. Each month she shelled out what I thought to be an inordinate chunk of her hard-earned tips to a lady who poured liquid acrylic over Maria’s fingertips before shaping, buffing, and polishing them into a flawless French manicure.
Read MoreMy mother created the world.
She controlled her world with rules and schedules, the litany of demands I was born to heed. Rules and schedules reigned over even the most intimate and involuntary of bodily functions, from how a child must train herself to turn carefully in her sleep to avoid messing up the bedcovers, to how she must avoid sneezing or coughing in public lest people think her mother is neglectful of her health, to her bathroom habits.
Read MoreS and I walk along the beach. Something feels different.
***
The night before I rode my bike to his house, uninvited. I pedaled thirty miles one way, hoping to meet his mother who was spending the weekend with him. I figured I’d just drop by, make a greeting, and all would be fine.
Read MoreYou wake up on the toilet staring at your dick. You’re naked but you think that’s not so bad because your roommate usually stays at his girlfriend’s house and, even if he’s not there tonight, he drinks as much as you do. You’ll have to walk into the living room and through the kitchen to get to the stairs of your shitty basement room, but if you do it fast he might not see your naked ass. Even if he does, you’ll only get shit about it for a week or two.
Read MoreMy grandmother, in her Golden years, was a collage artist. I remember the stacks of magazines she kept—Life, Time, Parade. Not to read, but to tear apart. Rip. Shred. Whole pages. Single words. Pictures of whatever caught her eye and would fit together with strokes of paint, watercolor, cotton, wire, and wood. She called it mixed media; I called it art.
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