Seville slouched at the end of the line near a timid child with sockets plunged so deep in his skull that the arches of his brows cast dour shadows over his chubby cheeks as a vagrant breeze pilfered the sweet pungent sting of pulverized ginger and garlic and powdered curry spices wafting from his dark [...]

“You rolled it too tight.”
I hand Anthony back his crooked joint, my throat parched.
“You roll it next time,” he says.
We pass bums who don’t bother asking us for money. Smoke trails from our lips while the cans in our backpacks rattle. Richard is behind us; virgin lungs making him cough and spit. I stare at [...]

Ken is lost on a train heading from Seattle toward Los Angeles. He needs to find a Barbie Girl before he reaches L.A. More importantly, he needs to pee.
He stumbles through the hallways and trips up and down the stairs of the Amtrak. His body swells like a pimple.
At the end of the corridor leading [...]

Nacho had once been an avid practitioner of various new age and occult activities, but had recently given up all notions of an eternal soul and heavenly realms in exchange for a less stringently structured form of atheistic materialism. His newfound rejection of the divine enabled him to indulge in activities he had once condemned [...]

The chairman of the Emergency Committee straightened his outlandishly fat polka-dot tie and nodded at me. He stood in the middle of a circle composed of concerned townspeople like myself. In an old classroom, we sat in scratched fold-up chairs discovered scattered on our front lawns, ones we otherwise might have thrown out.
After an introductory [...]

When the air rests a finger on the trigger and the grass stands at attention, the whole world holds its breath for fear of a change, afraid to shutter.

He pressed the trumpet’s mouthpiece against his lips and blew as hard as he could. A strange, awkward sound came out the other end, due to the improper placement of his lips. Just give up, a small voice inside him said, you’ll never learn how to play correctly. But Andrew knew that he had to [...]

Ken Wahl jerks his cock in front of my face. Kevin, Steven, and a bunch of other fuckheads hold me still on my living room couch while the man who used to play Vinnie Terranova spits on his cock. This is what I get for asking a guy like Kevin Jenkins to be my best [...]

A man walks into a grocery store. He forgot his shopping list at home. He picks up a green basket and walks into the produce section. The lighting hurts his eyes. Fruits and vegetables rot, he thinks. He will not buy them. He gazes at potatoes and wonders if other shoppers notice his apathy toward [...]

Exhausted, Bert leaves the crust of the last pizza slice in the box. With a burp, he ruminates on how his voice must’ve sounded while he was ordering. “Sorry, sir, still catching some static and noise on this end. This phone must really suck or something. Could you please repeat that?” After the girl’s voice [...]

Prim and Proper are listening to the radio. They are smiling as they sit next to each other, staring straight ahead, and one is tempted to say that they are listening to the wireless, rather than radio, so homely and old-fashioned and lovely is the reverence they accord this everyday activity. Prim and Proper have [...]

The idea hadn’t been to get beaten up. He wasn’t sure what it had been, but it sure wasn’t this. He felt the queer’s hand on his throat, pinning him to the ground. Felt the fingertips trail down his chest, slowing as they reached his stomach, then the palm pressing hard and firm to his [...]

It was on his knee, just above his tibia, not there one day but there the next. A patch no bigger than a quarter, maybe a half dollar. Not perfectly round; more like an inkblot. It may have been there for weeks, months, years, but he only noticed it that morning while waking to an [...]

She had curled up and slept — a cat nap to let her energy settle into the bowl of her belly. What had splashed up the sides during the day she had just needed to gather together again, like the last sip in a glass.
Coming back to consciousness, the quiet room came into focus. Her [...]

The job was killing me. When I told this to friends they would scoff. What did they know about the misery of grading student compositions? I played in a tennis league with men of various occupations: lawyers, doctors, salesmen, mechanics. They grumbled about high-level stress, long hours on the road, feral bosses. Some had visited [...]