David Bain was a doctor, a world class physician. Just not by traditional standards. He had no degree, no formal training, no office with loud paper sheets, stethoscopes and tongue depressors and no tubs of biohazard sharps. But when he … Read More
The thin strap of a duffel bag cut into Milo’s shoulder as he stood on the front step of the old house where he grew up. He studied a painfully new, gold mailbox that dangled a limp newspaper in its … Read More
Duncan Nussbaum always had a feeling God was out to get him. When he was six years old, he was eating a cheese sandwich – this was back when his parents still kept kosher – and snatched a piece of … Read More
There is a stop light in front of Weston Autobody; in evening the autoshop light sears mechanics. Some stand – columns – and hold cars with outstretched fingers. One hangs like a bodied hammock another is a bowed branch. The … Read More
I am on my balcony. I have been here for three days and two nights. It was my wife who put me here. It happened like this:
At dawn, when we wake, she wakes, I see: she, simulacrum of sweetie, presently bovine sweetie, clodhopper lovely, trundle fatly to her boudoir to assess the damage: six digits, the tally. These days, my girl: formidable haunches, breasts sapped of buoyancy, deflated balloon breasts, gobs of fatty skin where there ought only to be loveliness. She squirms into her negligee, once loose-fit, casual, today perilously taut, and thumps into the kitchen. When she walks her feet slap the floor.
The last few bars of a big-band tune exposing themselves without a hint of self-awareness and the half-sober apercus of a gaggle of twenty or so be-sequined, be-suited women and men of a certain age their laughter playing soft on … Read More
She had no plans to grow old, and she had no desire to feel her hips hurt (1). Minna was sitting by her grandmother’s bedside in Munroe Hospital when the woman called out in pain. Even though it has been nine years since her grandmother’s death, at night when Minna tries to fall asleep those screams still play like a broken record in her ears.
Writer’s note: I typed this thing before seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and then after I saw it I felt scooped. So don’t get hung-up about it, just be fascinated by how much all this stuff is in the ether, as they say.
