He sat in the truck parked on the gravel drive, his arm hanging out the window, a cigarette dangling from his finger. The radio was on and Bon Jovi's Bed of Roses was blaring.
She watched him from the behind the closed screen door.
He lowered the visor so she wouldn't be able to see his reddened eyes. Def Lepard's Pour Some Sugar On Me came on next, and he tweaked the volume nob. He could tell she was still looking at him.
He finished his cigarette and flicked it out the window. He took a long drink from the...
I think it's number nine. Eight maybe. All I know is my face is slightly tingled.
"Another," she asks as she walks past me.
I give an affirming nod. She has to know I am nearing my limit, but I have learned to play this off well.
"You had the Green Line, right?"
I nod again.
The Cubs are on, and they are losing. Nothing new there.
A couple sits in the corner talking about important couple things.
Two friends sit the right of me, discussing how much their lives and the Cubs suck.
The glass ends up in front...
The words hovered beneath my glowing finger, power incarnate. I lifted the text, spinning it lazily in the air, before hurling the curse at the image of my nemesis.
The photo I had ripped from the backcover of her book dissolved, dripping onto the table, her face hideously deformed, the black ink staining the tablecloth beneath.
"She thinks she can write horror," I said, the deathly silence of the basement swallowing my words. "She doesn't know what horror is." I smiled. "Yet."
She knew more than she was letting on - then again, that was her weapon. That was the way she lived her life, mostly on her wits.
He'd been watching her for longer than he should, longer than he'd been contracted to. He'd taken the case on (and that sounded ridiculous, he wasn't a detective, he was just a man) and had found himself captivated.
It wasn't lust. Wasn't love either. Neither of those things interested him, especially not with her (she may have been beautiful, once, a long time ago, or maybe she would become it when she grew...
He ran into the room, his heart pounding, and his clothes soaking wet.
"I just ate a fire hydrant," he said.
Mom and I were drinking tea by the fire. Now mom's brow furrowed.
"Donald, whatever do you mean?"
Donald peeled up his soaking wet shirt so we could see the hydrant protruding through his skin. I could see flecks of red paint trying to break through the skin above his solar plexus.
Mom went into the kitchen and came back with some pliers.
"We have to remove that hydrant," she said.
She stuck the pliers down his throat and...
Bombs were the last thing on his mind. It was scotch tape that was presently obsessing him. He had no idea why the image of scotch tape floated there, as it hovering in space, as the explosions and mayhem and chaos reigned around him.
Pierre Leclaire was a soldier in an army of two. Him and his dog Rufus. They had a gun, three boxes of crayons and a wad of chewed up Bubblicious. His mom had always told him he could make the most creative things out of nothing, so the bubblicious had become somewhat of an obsession.
Today,...
Outnumbered. Jezebel stands on the ledge, hands fluttering up and down the slick chains. Outnumbered. She tries to breathe, but her lungs are collapsing.
The flavor of hospital-stale, taste of bitter pills and pomegranate streaked on the sheets permeates her stupor, glitterdust before her eyes.
Flash. She is back to the ledge. They dance around her, ritual motions, holding soft torches and reaching out to stroke her draining carcass. Jezebel leans over, testing the water. There is gulping sea bellow, and beyond that, empty. She will fall into the turquoise sheet and then past it, going going gone.
Outnumbered. She...
Wow. The Statue of Liberty. I've lived in New York my whole life, and have personally seen it one time, and it's on my I heart NY credit card, of course. I played the Statue of Liberty once in a 5th grade play about America. I was "Miss Libby" and I sang about inflation. "The Red White and Blues" my song was called. I was 11. I wasn't a very great singer, but my teacher had great faith in me, as did my mother. There's a VHS tape of it somewhere, I do know that. Only once, though, have I...
Kenya. She said her name was Kenya.
And then she laughed. I couldn't hear it, not over the music in the bar, not over the shouting of everyone around us. But I saw the laugh, starting in her stomach, and traveling up and out of her mouth.
She leaned closer and said that her parents had grown up with Black Power and Africa awareness, and decided to name her Kenya. That they had grounded her the first time she straightened her hair.
Her voice, the part of her voice I could hear, had a huskiness to it that really appealed...
I awoke, pissed, the activity, not the feeling, took a shower, got dressed, made coffee, drank the coffee, fed the dog, the fish, the cat, watered the plants, left a note for the cleaning people, heard a story on NPR that made me think of you, began to write a poem about the us we were, before we became the non-us, still it felt good to think of you, your smile, shoes, the way you opened your eyes after they were closed in the aftermath of our coupling, when we were a couple, it turned me on, I went back...