The first story I remember writing was about a man who caught a two-headed fish. He held it in his hand, marveling at it for a while, and then he noticed that it had another hook in it's mouth. Somebody else had caught it and let it go. So he carefully removed his hook and set it free.
I don't know how old I was when I wrote that, but I'm still trying to write a better story.
"Well shit, that didn't work," the conductor said.
He walked around the wreckage, pulling out passengers. Women, mostly. The men waved off his advances.
One gloriously attired woman emerged from a smoldering welt of torn metal as though she were departing at Poughkeepsie. Nary a scratch or displaced hat-feather.... Read more
"Grandpop's teeth didn't look like that."
"How do you know?"
"Because mom always said you got his teeth. Do your teeth look like that?"
"Maybe after they'd been in the ground for fifty years."
"Not even. Look at the length of them."
"No, teeth keep growing... Read more
His dive, performed in front of the small, half-drunk dinner party, was perfect in his mind. He'd had a few martinis at dinner, his wife looking at him strangely over her chardonnay. But he was on a roll that night. And Joyce had come with that husband of hers, Jerry, and had shot him her own looks as he went on about this... Read more
An old sepia photo can be a bullet. It can tear through the lineup of neurons, neatly lined up like socks on a bed. It can make you aware that you are your latest incarnation. That you have been here before.
A mother and her child. Doesn't that child look familiar? Who remembers his own birth? Especially when it was 70 years... Read more
This sludgy finger of water curling around the land. A mucky smile that hides whatever you slip inside of it. The lake never tells.
So I'm pleased you chose this place to meet, my dear. You have solved a riddle I've kept hidden behind my own smile. Come closer for a moment so I can see your face in the moon.... Read more
Pointing skyward, his finger aflame.
"Can you come here a minute?"
Trying to catch the attention of surf but drawing only seagulls, which landed on his fingertip and looked around stupidly in the low sky of November.
My whole life is a finger on fire, and wrong things coming to help. A man wearing a hat. Some flotsam. A ship in the dead of night, a drunken captain