AT 9:30 PM ON A THURSDAY, Skip’s phone rang. Not his cell phone, but rather his office phone, the phone only the sales guy from Rawlings ever called. The ring interrupted the lighting of a cigar. Not a Cuban, but a decent one nevertheless. Six games into the season, it was a bit early for … Continue reading Skip, Prez and The King of Dirt
IN THE EVENINGS after she gets out of the shower, which she takes with the bathroom door ajar so that you and a nurse can call to her every two minutes and make sure she’s okay, you help your daughter thread her i.v. tubes and monitor wires through the wide sleeves of her hospital gown, … Continue reading In 2020 Everyone Got COVID But She Got An Eating Disorder Instead
night falls quite suddenly over war in other countries, while the morning is fine here and biteable, clean as new coins. a young man, with control for his shift of a remote operation security gate, fiddles the buttons at a private estate entrance just on the outside of blackrock. another man driving a truck with … Continue reading Sunrise and Building-Cast Shadows
GOLETA, CALIFORNIA, is known as the Goodland — avocado and citrus groves, lush farms, Pacific beaches — but I only know it as the Postal Badlands. It’s 1981, I’m thirty-one, and I hate my job. My head pounds as I walk in. The mail processing plant overwhelms me. It’s larger than a baseball field, noisier … Continue reading Random Distribution
image of christ appears on anempty billboard just north of townbut this is not hope dead men are not the future let the dogs run wild let the children live in fear taste of gasoline should beenough to keep them going the promise of pain andabandoned shopping malls everything broken andseen from a distance bulldozers … Continue reading A Brief History of the Kingdom of Nil
GABBY MCCURTRY PULLED INTO the narrow garage under her townhouse. The day she’d moved in, she tied plastic spoons to bright yellow yarn, suspended them from the ceiling as parking parameters. She eased her car forward, nudged the dangling spoons, and peered into all corners. Once certain she was alone, she pushed the gearshift into … Continue reading Risk Management
EVERYTHING ABOUT ANSON VAYE was underground. His life, his career – if you could call it that – even his personality had the feel of something that had spent most of its days covered in earth. A jack of all trades and a practitioner of none. One late barroom night, some professorial sloshed egghead announced … Continue reading The Man Comes To Town
Out past the last town lies the land of nothing. Thirty-million years ago this tectonic plate failed to stretch itself thin enough to build any new ocean. Only scars remain: normal faults and rock piles. Valleys, filled to their throats with sediments, enough space to contain all the ghosts and wild burros. This sagebrush sky … Continue reading Basin And Range
After the stroke you could not lift your left hand to meet your right in prayer, so a daughter pressed her young flesh full palm against your wrinkled one so your hands could speak for your lips were cracked in a mouthy desert of dried saliva. This daughter, by your sidetried to abide the ordersto … Continue reading Tic Tac
OLD SAMSON COULDN'T FEEL his hands because of the coldness of the gun. Or maybe it was the snow that gathered on his jacket, looking like the ash in the dead fire pit back at camp. But the numbness steadied his aim. He was chilled beyond shivering. No longer did his body fight off the … Continue reading The Morph Deer