We begin, as all good stories do, with a fall. We plummet from the bright, ashen sky toward clouds the color of cataracts. Passing through the smog, a red landscape stretches out in every direction. Below, The City rises to greet us, its central spire a thumbtack on an rust-colored carpet. Dust storms swirl at …
While many websites are blacking themselves out today, in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, I thought this would be a perfect time to break my accidental vow of silence and speak. The internet has evolved from its very basic database form into a communications tool the likes of …
The boy is now a man. He stands, feet upon the pavement of a bustling Manhattan street. He is successful. He turned his nothingness into purpose, bringing to bear a wealth of skills and emotional detachment to the field his father had excelled in. A floor of a building in downtown New York now bears …
The next morning had yielded a quiet, stale breakfast. The food lay uneaten, cooling and congealing in heaps upon diner flatware. The old man spoke occasionally, remarking on the scenery of the campus and the presumption he held that his hard earned dollars were being put to good use. The son sulked and sweated, expending …
He still sometimes dreams of it. The day his father visited him. The day things changed. He sleeps, innocent and firmly tucked beneath sheet and quilt, and the visions come to him. By the end, his face was a mess. Tears left thin salty tracks on his cheeks, his mouth dribbling with spit and rage. …
Regret is to people what autumn is to leaves. It withers them, takes away what made them what they were. Leaving behind crooked husks. She’s died. She’s gone and dead. After the boy left, the calls came further and further apart. He’d found a new life and she was left here, in the wreckage. Empty …
Fifteen years ago. The boy stood smiling for photographs, blue gown draped over his gangly frame. He had to keep adjusting the tassel which swung from the front of his cap. It was getting in his eyes, synthetic fibers tickling his nose. He stood at the front of a crowd assembled, and delivered a valedictory …
An image floats into his mind. He’s lying on his bed, the padded quilt beneath him. In the black of his closed eyes, he sees. He remembers. A row of flashbulbs goes off, bright white sugarcubes exploding as one atop the black and blue plastic frame of his mother’s camera. He’s at the head of …
It’s amazing how fast disappointment fades into acceptance. How I could be so distraught one day then over time lose hold of that feeling. It slipped from my fingers, like a cliff’s edge, and I tumbled into the abyss of routine. The boy is 4 tomorrow. He started preschool a few months back and of …
His wife had become more and more reclusive. She sat by the crib, gazing at her child over the top of a magazine. The same page facing her for hours and hours. She was thinner now than she had been before pregnancy, save the life-giving swelling of her chest. Her face was gaunt and trifold …
