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 …
They returned early the next morning, still smiling but crumpled from their second night at the hospital. A pile of mail greeted them, drooling out of the slot onto the floor of the entryway. They ignored it, instead both focusing on the tiny bundle of joy in her arms. The father set about building a …
The husband stood nervously in the hallway, picking at his teeth and studying his fingernails as though the resolution to his anxieties lay crusted beneath the yellowed tips. He had been up all night. His hair was a greasy brush, short and dark and sticking off his head at odd angles. Two light brown eyes …
Hi all. The last one’s theme, as you may have noticed, was that of life in New York. My life, specifically. I realize that this may have led to some more opinionated and less-fictional entries, but I was taking a page from the book of the field of Creative Non-Fiction, a concept introduced to me …
I’m in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—the ironically beating heart of hipsterdom—because an old friend asked me to help him move a mattress. After 20 minutes of negotiating the monstrous sponge of Tempur™ material down winding stairs, we had a couple of beers and went our separate ways. He to the van in which his bed now resides, …
