Corporate Son

From over the wall of my cubicle, I hear my boss say to Jerry that from now on all of the duties and responsibilities of a supervisor are his, congratulations. Wow, I think. Jerry? Really? The guy who eats from the seven-layer dip in the break room with his hands?

Field Notes from the Mud

The woke me in the night by grinding their teeth next to my ears. Their thin torsos stretched onto the walls and ceiling in black silhouettes as if they were dancing around a flame in a cave...

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE: A LETTER FROM F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, QUARANTINED IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE

Dearest Rosemary,

It was a limpid dreary day, hung as in a basket from a single dull star. I thank you for your letter...

Remain Open to it, Without Naming it

Excitable Matèo Joseph, security guard, would be the first to enter the ninth-floor elevator of St. Peter’s Hospital after having spent an hour hiding in the breakroom of the Pediatrics department...

Three Times I've Seen My Dad Cry

On a sunny afternoon in May 2006, I had skipped baseball practice to try psychedelic mushrooms for the first time; but when I got home to pick up the mushrooms from the basement refrigerator, I found my dad violently sobbing at the kitchen table...

The Flaming Hawk

On la noché de las velitas, the night of the candles, my family was setting up a vigil for my dead brother in the shape of a hawk, his favorite bird...

The Boy with a Void

Monty was born with something missing. The doctors saw it in an x-ray when he was four. What showed on the scan was a small void, next to the heart, that gave his mother an explanation for his weird behavior...

Noose Tattoo

When my uncle showed up at my door unexpectedly, he had a noose tattooed around his neck and carried a long rope bundled up in his hand...

Weight of the Clouds

On the morning of the day she promised to make the five o’clock news, she watches her boy lie in the grass from the window above the kitchen sink...

Analogia Entis

1998. It’s August. There’s hardly anyone on the beach. The morning sky hangs low in an overcast, creating coins of light flipping on the ocean’s surface...

Cracked

Someone who was once very famous, but not so much anymore, said, “Every whole person has ambitions, initiatives, goals,” about a boy who was very particular and wanted to press his lips to every square inch of his own body...

A Big Break

What's happening now is my face is on the cool bathroom tile of apartment 2904 and my brain is being flooded with color...

Thrownness

Born into this world of terror and flame, of a hot spiritual cleaning—is this not how to start over?Burn away your materials, the objects of meaning tying you down to your past?

Purelight™

Outside Anne's Tavern, Foster meanders through the parking lot, fumbling for the key for his sedan while struggling to hang on to the doggy bag of the chicken marsala dish his Craigslist date had barely touched before taking off...

Rules for Escaping

The man awakes in a room of his own design. He stretches across the green ripped up couch, looks around. In front of the couch are two leather desk chairs with a safe between them...

Binary

It was the beginning of what the Farmer’s Almanac was calling a “dry summer.” When I read that on a rainy February afternoon in Raven’s Coffee Shop, I couldn’t really comprehend its meaning...