My sister, the wooly haired, laugh a lot, chatterbox, Liv Oh, at age nine or so, saw Digg, the goat bodied, eagle-headed desert God fucking his sister, Uwe, the gazelle bodied, fish-headed Goddess. Liv Oh witnessed the Holy Union in the high desert under bright spring skies and giggled, covered her mouth, too late.
“Three things?” he said.
“Three things,” Lexie said. She was lying on her stomach, ankles crossed and held in the air, typing on her Mac. He had a Dell himself. But Lexie and her mother were Apple through and through. His ex-wife would buy a toilet seat if the Apple logo was on it.
I woke up feeling tired, even though I thought that I had slept through the night. My wife Sally looked like she hadn’t slept much either. I expected her to complain about my snoring, but she surprised me by saying “Duke, when did you become a great singer?”
Underneath a billboard beside the highway, an imperious impression of a gorilla spun a banana-shaped sign which read “Free cable & HBO & air conditioning.” It was early spring and the air cool and crisp, but the gorilla had been at it for several hours—throwing the sign up in the air, swirling it around his limbs, passing it around his back—the man underneath undoubtedly hot from the body heat trapped in his fake polyester furs. Cars filled with people on their way to work would occasionally honk hello, and the gorilla man would wave and point at the sign. The cars would then slowly pass, the occupants smiling and nodding but not looking directly at him.
Continue reading “Some Animals by Alexander Franks – Adult content”
This is the story of a girl who became a goose.
It began with a broken heart. Eloise found herself crying in unexpected places at unexpected times. In the grocery line, when a clerk with kind eyes asked with such sincerity, How are you today?, her eyes brimmed. The answer swelled in her throat. She had to look away and mutter Fine, I’m fine. She was not.
Continue reading “The Girl Who Became a Goose by K. Barrett”
“Tell me where it hurts,” he says.
Are you fucking kidding me? There isn’t enough time for that. But I know he’s not asking about that. My eyes are black from the corners to across the bridge of my nose, swollen across the bridge. My nose feels like hamburger meat rotting on a kitchen counter that we forgot to put away because Kenny actually showed up on time with the dope for once. That meat sweated and swelled and stank for a week before we finally came down and realized there was a dead animal rotting next to the empty cans of beer and overflowing ashtrays and stacks of dollar bills from a great weekend at the club.
Whatever happened to the power-chord?
To which my boyfriend lit a bowl
Was A Stairway to Heaven really the greatest song?
Think it over as you pass that on
Said he’d love me till the end of time;
Forever came to stay in 1989
Still, he was never all so great;
For me that bell had tolled in ‘88
Thirty years go by in the glaze of an eye;
Can it be it’s always the promising future that lies?
*******
When my sister Tess and I were girls we’d often visit our father’s grave in New Town Cemetery. Although he had died suddenly when I was two and Tess an infant (thus destined to be little more to us than a face in the family photo album and a grave in the cemetery), we’d make time for “Dear Father” because we had agreed that it was the sort of thing daughters should do. I would recite a psalm memorized from Granna Ivy’s Bible, and Tess would lay a hastily clapped-together bouquet of daisies, buttercups and bluebells on his headstone. I recall admonishing her for the frequent inclusion of dandelions to the arrangement, “Those are weeds, numbskull.” Tess would defend the addition of dandelions on the grounds that “Nobody grows daisies, buttercups or bluebells on purpose, either, bonehead.”
Aliens Invade Florida! You May Be Next!
There are weird spots all around this country—like Plano, Texas, home of the Cockroach Hall of Fame and Museum—and then there’s Hell Country, a patch of the Everglades so remote, it stands apart from time altogether. As a crack reporter for the Weekly World News, I’d visited a number of strange and eerie sites, but Hell County was a whole different animal. No one goes to Hell Country unless they’re running drugs or fleeing the law. It’s a network of badlands full of lightning-struck sawgrass marshes and impenetrable cypress and mangrove forests lost to the brackish reserves of time. Hell Country’s marshes are so vast, so immeasurable, that their topography changes over the hundreds of miles this river of grass consumes, from stale pine forests to coastal prairies whose more colorful denizens include stone crabs, alligators, and Burmese pythons. Oddly enough, though, it isn’t the pythons—which I’ve photographed—that haunt me to this day. It’s my friend from fifty years ago, Dalton Trummel, the last of a strange breed of tabloid reporters who never let well enough alone and vanished because of it.
Continue reading “Confessions of a Failed Weekly World News Reporter by Jonathan DeCoteau”
Front door shut and locked. Push it again, jiggle the handle a few more times, to be sure. I left it open once — maybe more than once?—and next-door’s cat got in the house. Henry wasn’t pleased with me. He’s been so good, so patient, but he was very upset about the door. I’ve been much more careful since.
Continue reading “No Past, No Future, Just Now by Michelle Ann King”
I could picture what it would be like if we met again all these years later. It might go down like this: After 670 miles of a pretty cross country haul, I’d see the meeting-place pub we’d picked sitting brown and ugly like a hovel at the side of the road, a meeting place for the century, out there in some square, hard country setting. And I’d brace myself for comrades, the long stretch between get-togethers, wondering what the hard stuff would do to me this time. Undoubtedly it would leave tracks again.
I closed my eyes, wondering all over again. I hoped Balbo would be in there and Diaz. I hoped Archie’d be in there, red in the face, after his fifth visit, his third wife, his second hospital stay, counting his visits, keeping the tab at his elbow, paying it with no fanfare at all, sometimes embarrassed by his own quick acceptance of it, owing somebody, always owing somebody in this crazy life.
Continue reading “A Half Century Come and Gone by Tom Sheehan”
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