cunningham's Page

The old used plates run anywhere from fifty cents to a dollar and a half apiece and she is looking for something specific in the near ruin of the thrift store shelves. She has a box under her arm to gather what she finds as her fingers pick thru the china and plastic, lift and move the chipped and broken, browse thru the flowered and the sparkling. Here is a butterfly pattern, here is a rose; here is an abstract pattern, here art deco lines intertwine. She selects carefully; she knows that each… Continue

The light was strange, silver. He opened one eye and some of the brightness faded into vague familiarity, amorphous shapes he could almost recognize.

He dragged himself upright into a sitting position on the hotel bed. The mirror above the empty dresser was greasy, and his reflection bent and twisted as he shifted around, searching for some position where his bones didn't feel like they were being ground into splintered shards; his mind had holes in it, large gaps filled with the rushing sound… Continue

We’d become snarling creatures of our ineffective rage, our frustrated compassion. We turned on each other in our darkest moments of futility like horrible fanged animals spitting invective and vileness. It was no use. The walls dripped with our useless desire to help, to burst in all directions at once, to solve this problem and a thousand others just like it. We screamed at the sun.

We wanted to dig under the festering skin of this suburban nightmare and unearth the cancerous spot, tear it ou… Continue

“Well, if the doctor told me to stop or it might kill me, I’d like to think I’d pay attention; like, if I’d been hurting or something, and I went thru the trouble of going to the doctor, paying for it, feeling everything, all the bad, the cold table, the instruments, the worry, you know, all that shit, well, I’d think a person would pay attention.”

The air from the window unit blew ashes over the edge of the ashtray in weak little bursts; each puff slipped off the coffee table and down onto the… Continue

I landed hard on the ground and spread my fingers out across the dirty asphalt, checking to see if they still worked; they did. I got back up and looked around. Nobody saw anything. I found a small spot of blood on my jeans.

The city yawned around me. I walked out of the alley onto the sidewalk and moved north thru the faceless afternoon.