Estlin rolls over and puts his arm around Isabelle. He squeezes her close to his body. He kisses her head, as she moves to get out of his embrace. “Stop,” she mumbles. “I’m trying to sleep.” Estlin sighs and rolls out of bed. It is noon already and he can hear the noise and music …
The toddler hangs straight-legged from his arm cradle while he bangs with the side of his fist on the plate glass of the storm door that he had to re-install because her husband knew nothing more on how to do anything but sit on his ass and have somebody else do it. When she comes …
Something out of a movie called, The Lover’s Duel. Boy meets girl in street scene while girl above looks on yearning for her own scene, perhaps, while the couple below posture and prepare for their dance, their duel without pistols standing guard in defense of their heart; perhaps he plays it cool, casual and all-the-while …
(Spoken in a voice loud and deep and resonant enough to fill a large plush-chaired auditorium with box seating, uniformed ushers and guests in Mink shawls.) Hello, I am a sub-prime borrower, a less than, an unsavory investment riddled with high interest debt like bullet holes in a Renault on a street in Aleppo; don’t …
Between her thumb and forefinger she holds the butt end of a bent, smoldering joint and inhales as the rain beats fat heavy cold drops down upon her and the toddler in her stroller blissfully unaware of strange smells, rain spells and where in space, time and geography she sits strapped to plastic wheels as …
She sits alone at the bar and thinks how she’s an archetype lyrical subject for phony romantics, men mostly, with scruff faces and long oily hair constantly tucked behind flaky ears and beneath hundred dollar camel hair hats that every hopeful idiot wears and strums an old Washburn in his room at midnight while the …
From the sidewalk, T.S. Bar gave a vibrant aura. Open casement windows let out the speaker cringes of jukebox anthems, while bar chatter and laughter and shrieks of greetings mingled with the clink and crash of empty bottles into trash cans. The chalk board sign by the door read in colorful, loopy letters; ‘Jack & …
She loved him. I like to think that’s why she left me. They had known each other before me. In a time in their lives when she was ready and he was not. I came along later. After what moments of fumbling lust and displaced emotions had expired, she escaped me and waited for him. …
GOODBYE DICK His birthday gift to her, a set of full tang stainless steel kitchen knives, lay strewn about on the counter. He lay on the floor, his penis in her left hand. A peculiar thing, she thought. It can grow and squirm like such an altogether separate entity of the body. Its ability to …
The garage was converted into a living room; years before Michael sat on the sofa in there, reading the dry inky pages of a celebrity gossip rag. Grandma Jude and her boyfriend Carl, sat at the dining room table. Carl smoked Winston’s and drank from cans of Budweiser. Grandma Jude smoked slims and drank diet …
