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 [...]

1: I love you more than I love to eat brains
After the show, Mara coils her intestines up carefully and threads them back through the hemmed slit of her bellybutton. I mirror her, coiling up her guitar leads and putting them behind the amps so she doesn’t get them mixed up. She did that once [...]

I’ll punch holes in the eyes of god. I was feeling mellow a while ago, but that’s changed. I’m gnawing on the jaw of a crystalline skull. Blood bursts in my temples. There are no kill switches or safety valves in this experience. Different highs are manifested depending on which part of the skull is [...]

A fanatic reader of western stories, a dreamer of the wide and far land and what it had to offer, Fenwick Mercer had come all the way from Boston to find his way in the western plains. Early on he was proper, courteous, and well-dressed, but that demeanor, raiment and habit became old, worn, discolored, [...]

It’s the final frame, the one that freezes before the credits roll.
Finger pointed at Veronica Cartwright, at the camera, at us, at the entire world, Donald Sutherland opens his mouth like some undiscovered fish scooping muck from the deepest parts of the ocean and screeches a sonic hell-sound that could never be properly replicated by [...]

April was a 65-year-old woman who lived in a run-down 24-room Victorian mansion, complete with a once-glorious garden designed by the same man who drew up the plans for New York City’s Central Park, in what had been a most elite neighborhood in a small historic New England town.

Originally published in Verbicide issue #24
After I’d been at AHCC for about nine months I got piss tested. What happened was I was in bed happily dreaming around four in the morning, and the door slammed open and a cop shined a flashlight in my eyes.
“Mr. Butcher,” he said. “Report to the day room for [...]

Originally published in Verbicide issue #24
I ran into this kid, Fly, who I hadn’t seen in ages. He wasn’t a kid anymore, either. He’d gained about a buck ten to make his weight out at about two flat, and he was now working for the cable company. I did interior carpentry and some unlicensed electric [...]

Apr 1, 6:35 PM EDT
Montreal Opens Labatt Park In Style
By ALEXANDER POUTINE
Associated Press Writer
MONTREAL, QC (AP) — After a six-year delay held up by the complicated sale of the Montreal Expos by failed businessman Jeffrey Loria to Stephen Bronfman, the Montreal Expos celebrated the long-awaited opening of Labatt Park by pounding the Philadelphia Phillies 11-6.
Nick [...]