Every day like today I walk in and watch him pour ferment into the mouths of woozy patrons, dispensing vice for a fee. At the end of each night he and I peel the drunkest from their stools before collecting sop-wet singles from the bar. Tonight was a good night, he said counting, and I nodded and asked how much. He told me but I didn’t hear the number. Still I smiled because he looked proud.
Read more →The world was outside and it was finally over. Vivienne turned the knob shut. The dead lock slammed in its socket and rung through her fingertips, startling her more. She watched her slow hand tremble up toward the door chain, where it fumbled to hitch the bolt to its frame.
Vivienne collapsed against the back of the door. Her knees buckled as she fought, halfhearted, against her own giving way. She sagged to the floor, legs splayed, resigned. Her purse slipped from her shoulder and sounded the cacophonous miscellany within when it dropped beside her, which only aggravated the throbbing in her skull.
Read more →If I could be reborn, if I could be somewhere simple, where streets aren’t wet with sick and slop, and I could be a gentleman. I could be someone I loved. Someone who knew how to love her. Then I would know what to say those nights we were sprawled beneath the star-lit everything.
I closed my eyes and breathed deep the fresh, fragrant hay rounds near the bypass. Where we lay was enveloped in an orchestra of crickets supported by the steady bass coming from my truck engine. It was cold, but we were warm.
Read more →The city below was shrouded in the distance to here. Faraway sirens and three a.m. trains groaned for attention amid the pitch dark of my thoughts. Tipsy pedestrians doddered home in an undertone of drunk emotion, which, caught in the updraft, winded together and danced loose with leaves and light refuse until it finally reached me in a solitary whimper, a medley of how the world felt, and we bonded.
I lay flat against the roof, staring at the big, black nothing above me: a sky poisoned by the steady drip of street lights and neon signs. The surviving specks weren’t stars at all, but suggestions of a reality rendered unreachable for the blind-sided citizens of tomorrow.
Read more →The secret lay in his gait. He had only to think of his own lightness lifting him from the unforgiving streets of his neighborhood, until his toes dipped lower than his heels and his legs began to dangle. He skipped slow above the familiar, broken streets and sidewalks, over fields of earth and crabgrass.
It was getting hard for Carson to distinguish between his visions and reality because he woke up in dreams just as soon as he’d in fact fell asleep. In his dreams, nothing was much different from his waking life other than in his dreams he could fly. Some days the soft breeze would buoy him slowly higher, until he could kiss the stratosphere, and it was there he would meet with God.
Read more →An underwhelming fuck and a few dollars on the nightstand: this, my friends countless reminded me, was what being a man felt like. Before the military, I had only ever made love. But I finally understood that love was effeminate. Sex with a prostitute was less exchange than broadcast, not love or even fucking but better described as being fucked at. They assured me affection was an innocence cured by distance and whores, and I believed them.
Read more →Weekdays on the R train always offered Daniel hope for humanity.
There he would sit quietly with his knees tucked together in his Sunday best, but it was Wednesday. He cautiously folded his hands over his lap, taking great pains to place them discreetly around the inscription on the Bible he carried around for effect. Catching the train at Forest Hills, he suffered through stops separating him from purgation: a saccharine seraph named Christina who had charity in hazel eyes and bleeding heart.
Read more →Daniel got lost in the soiled scene taking place on the tracks beneath the subway platform at 51st and Lexington. He stared at two rats gnawing hungrily at the mangled corpse of a third and thought about the idea of progress. We’re dirty things. We started off on all fours like all of God’s creatures, [...]
Read more →Winter comes ‘round every once in a while to remind you that you got no one to keep you warm. All that cold breath gives you a cover for your shiverin’ and keepin’ to yourself and holdin’ your books real tight and stayin’ inside. These nights the black chill comes on real quick—and darker than [...]
Read more →Nights were the hardest. After the sun settled behind confection homes, dark seeped in like monoxide and him here alone in a house full of mirrors again. The bourbon cap: another kept treasure lost, now only to physical reach. White-collared shirt undone two buttons down and his tie with slack, pressed against the back of [...]
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