Like electrons darting about an atom’s nucleus, the flies are already circling about the victim’s dead body---a noisy hum against the murder scene’s otherwise grim silence.  I hate this part of the job, but I steel myself as I reach into the deceased's suit-coat pocket and remove a silver cell phone. Perusing the phone’s call history, I immediately dial the last number that the dead man had, only an hour earlier, dialed.  A number accompanied solely by the name “Honey.”  Three rings, and a…

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She begins to make a list—not the kind of list you scribble down and take the supermarket—but a mental list of impossible things that are nearly possible: laughing fish, blue lemons, birthday cakes with dynamite candles, her skeleton, fresh out of bones, the man she almost married, a dark hole aimed at a bullet. 

 

My thoughts are radio waves, with geometric messages, no one, but I, can hear. Whatever I do, I must not let anyone know how to find me-- not here,…

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He looked out the bedroom window, which itself looked out on a stand of oaks and maples. The trees were silent and waiting for a change in the weather. They were sleeping. Each tree sleeping alone, their bark, beautiful skin in the rain. Bark, thick and old and rough-textured like a cat's tongue. It was hard to imagine that their skin was theirs, and theirs, only.  Who could imagine that the trees belonged only to themselves, and to no one, and nothing else?

 

Liza was happy as a cup cake. Nothing made her a happier than to be the star of her own “show,” even if the “show” was her 40^th birthday party—an event she had been long dreading.  Forty was indeed an ominous landmark.

 

Jane, Liza’s best girlfriend, hoped it would be a hilarious surprise when the male stripper popped out of the towering, frosting-covered, structure, at precisely the moment Liza blew out the one candle perched at the cake’s glittering peak.…

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There was absolutely no one in the room, or so it felt to Janine, as the sad, late-afternoon, lemon light streamed through her living room window. 

 

Why is the alphabet always recited in the same order?  Janine worried her tongue over her upper lip as she wondered, Am I in alphabetical order?

 

She shifted her weight in her chair, leaned to her left side, and again spooned her upper lip with her tongue, This is my finest…

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“It’s not that I think about sex all the time, it’s just that I don’t think about anything else,” proclaimed Too-thin Slim (a.k.a. Benny Friedman, son of a  Jacksonville pharmacist) of Too-thin Slim and the Jungle Gyms.

 

“Well, what about your music, don’t you think about rock and roll at least once in a while?”

 

“Nope…just play what comes to…

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She was so married that she wore wedding rings on both hands.  We worked six days a week at adjacent cash registers at the Oskaloosa  mini-mart, and I secretly gawked at her, as if I were an infatuated farm boy at a Des Moines strip club.  I was as invisible to her as salt on snow.  How could she notice me?  I wasn't even there--my love as impossible as a December… Continue

You sit there with your sad, undone eyes, no longer a lover, no longer a fighter.  A cynical I-told-you-so resignation stunts your voice, as you assure me it’s no longer even hopeless--- I’m bad all the way through.

 

“Everything goes bad, if you give it half a chance,” I parry.

 

But you’re neither convinced, nor merciful.  You vow to donate my body to science, or to have me stuffed and mounted on the moon.  

 

“Beneath the striped fur of the…

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I took Mom to the prom.  Yeah, everybody laughed at me. Said it was ‘cause I was a loser.  Said, I couldn’t get a real date if I was the last man on earth, but I don’t care.  Only thing was, on the way home, Mom insisted on stopping at the Bank of America and blowing up the ATM machine with two sticks of dynamite, with only one fuse. Man, I tell you, that woman may be ugly, but she’s rich and she sure can dance.

 

 

She’s transcribed testimony at hundreds of trials.  Mostly, she detests the gray, open sea-like boredom, the monotonous, horizon-less judicial detail, as it automatically flows through her fingers into the keys of the stenotype machine.

 

Today, the grisly details of the officer’s testimony, the precise reconstruction of the child’s last hours, nauseate her, as she stares straight ahead, concentrating on the policeman’s blood-red words as if they were a stain on the…

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I notice the nervous giant, the night watchman, with too much time on his hands, pacing the floor of the toy factory.   He’s restless and cramped, here, where the machines, joyful as ukuleles, sleep. The machines don’t know how to be unhappy.

 

The giant’s enormous hands are red from wringing, his worried face seems larger than the moon.  In his case, mistakes were made, but is it really such a sin to be so…

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