Fiction

He was terrified that his parents would kill each other if he did nothing to stop them. At the same time, he felt a fierce resentment rise up inside of him. He wanted to help them, but he also needed to punish them...

“He was not, really; he was a rich bourgeois nationalist. He just wanted to do some reforms, like land reform and nationalizations, and he was OK with diplomacy with Cuba and the Soviet Union. But rich capitalists here and in the United States wouldn’t have any of it.”

The prisoners were dragged to their knees, positioned to face the street. Car 1’s high beams lit their faces. They squinted away in discomfort. And one by one, the men from Car 1 came up and abused them.

I don’t even know how to take care of myself and my throat hardens and there’s a blue whale swimming in my chest and the water flows from my eyes.

You’re not evolving. At all. Steve Jobs gave you an iPhone maybe, and yet cancer took him away. Your technology changes here and there, but you, as creatures, do not.

And a smoky ghostlike Face had come to the Dead Boy’s mother Tammy in a dream, and said many incomprehensible things, which Tammy thereby did phone in to the local radio show and soon Tammy was with child.

She looked up and down the aisle to see who might have observed this. The older woman interrogated another label. The small dark inverted dome of a ceiling camera watched, but at its angle the bulky jacket should have blocked any view of the theft.

He had kept the tooth pressed into my palm the whole time, and now it stuck there in a skin-pit of its own carving. The blood had all but dried. Watching it, I was momentarily convinced that the tooth was moving, shaking somehow by itself, but I came to realize it was, in fact, my own heartbeat...

A CRYPTID slams down from the ceiling like a soggy futon stuffed with gossip, hitting the floor with a sound halfway between a slap and a whimper, then immediately begins steaming—not with heat, but personal humidity.

The VW bus rocked and giggled inside, snowflakes falling like feathers that night on Providence. Drawn to the clouds of piney smoke seeping from the bus, I couldn’t cover my loud laughter.