The strange first moments of a dream had just started, again, when the police officers pulled me from bed. Their hands hovered above the pistol on their hips. They screamed at me in spit-laden Spanish. The remaining cloud of uncertainty between whether I was still dreaming or living in reality wisped away when I could …
Category: short fiction
Sitting at a breakfast bar in the afternoon
12 hour shift bartender pops in, plops down for 3 big togo cold coffee drinks, rubs her round pink cheeks - feeling the stressors of previous days, and today’s bleary late morning arousal, not to mention the fragile life we’ve built atop this crust, the building frustrations of being alive in-the-now surrounded by humans’ demands …
Continue reading Sitting at a breakfast bar in the afternoon
Robots Don’t Think
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 …
Estlin & Isabelle
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 …
Street Scene
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 …
Credit Score Blues
(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 …
Single Mothers
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 …
Sad Song At the Bar
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 …
A City Morning Ensemble
In the city just before dawn, as the electric lights buzz and shine dark pathways for the part-time insomniac crazies; the ones innately aware of the spare benches, the steam vents and the empty ledges; they are all something or rather, caretakers free from taking care; the scribblers - a Santa Claus clone sitting alone …
Happy Hour
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 & …
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