Fiction

I thought I was being clever, covering my ass. Turned out I was setting a match under it instead.

The collection of men, all dressed in deep black suits, chuckled. Phillip smiled with his lips pressed together.

"Which way for sporting goods?" I politely asked. She looked at me and then all around her, up, over the products, into the hazy distance.

Easy Luck sits in the corner, condensation on the glass of water in front of her gives the illusion of badly cut diamonds weeping.

I don’t really know how it happened, all I know is that sometime before Martin Luther King Jr. Day in fourth grade, Jillian Dafotis creeped into part of my brain that was usually occupied by comic books and my older brother’s Super Nintendo.

To hell with that piano, I thought. It had a dead note anyway.

Davy and my little brother Frankie were never apart. They sat next to each other in school, they hung out together during recess. They played on the same Little League team. And they fished together every Saturday morning in the Nepperhan Creek. I doubt they caught much. The stream near the former carpet mill was [...]

Tonight, in the sleeping bag, Mara takes off all her clothes. And that’s it: she takes off all of her clothes.

This woman was beautiful in a way that makes you sorry you were born.  

Today’s my lucky day and I’m gonna take that thousand up to the Indians, triple my money on the $10 tables and Maxine’ll have birdhouses coming out her ass by tomorrow this time.

For a while there the dust settled, and I thought maybe things had gotten as bad as they were going to get. But I was wrong. Now, we steal electricity.

She walked past dark taverns where shadowed figures talked low
outside over cigarettes whose ends burned bright. She passed always
the ordinary figures in the brightly lit laundromat, of whom she
was inexplicably jealous.

He looked at me. All I could see were his eyeballs, brown amidst
white orbs. We shook hands firmly. A cloud of powder punctuated
our embrace.

I couldn’t hold my pencil in school, therefore I never learned to write cursive. But one thing I could do, I could throw a mean punch in any direction and this made kids run for cover.

He sought to erase her from his mind rather than to become plagued
by the weight of his inactions and her devilish silence. He believed
one should always prepare for the future by releasing the present
and dreaming the past.

But this time we weren’t the only ones listening. The car behind us had a sad clown audience too, and they were all smiling just like we were.

Alcohol: the sharp spur, kicking into his side. He wipes the sweat from his eyes with his cuffs.

Because of the flood, no one wanted the sunken treasure figurines Pesky’s had advertised on sale. He tried to shake me off his leg, but I was too strong.

The buildings were asleep. They weren’t thinking
like they do in the winter, looking down at you and almost smiling.
In the winter they want you to come in and get warm. In the summer
they hibernate. That’s what I hope at least. I hope that something
hasn’t died since last winter.

Everything was so familiar it hurt.

She was just taking her liver and lungs for coffee. It was morning. She had to go.