All Stories

There’s always more than you think there will be. It floods out with such gusto, as if it has been waiting for this day to be free. Perhaps it is happy to be away from going through the same veins and arteries every day that it simply savors this chance to see the world. This cement floor isn’t much, but I imagine it’s a nice change of pace. I would get up and try to find some help, but I don’t think I can make it there. I wonder if anybody else knows I’m here. I suppose it doesn’t matter much.

He jumped from the bed where his boss’s wife lay giggling. Their lunchtime tryst had lasted longer than expected, and he was late for another meeting where that same boss would certainly note his absence. His clothes were scattered from bedroom to front door, where she had ordered him to strip an hour before. He found and managed to put on his briefs, pants, shirt, tie, jacket, socks, and left shoe – but the right shoe had vanished. They searched until a growl from the kitchen led them to discover $100 worth of Italian leather half eaten beneath her dog’s big paws.

Black as night and cold as daylight after an acid trip. This is what it felt like walking down the street after a hard night drinking. I was thinking about my cubicle, post-it-notes, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and my broken stapler – when it hit me. A car, not a life changing epiphany or sudden moment of lucid awareness that my life meant nothing. No, the opportunity to kill myself once I realized that, was suddenly taken from me when a car hit me in the dead of night. Now I can’t even lift a knife to slit my throat.

Phantoms of light dance across my lids in a tangerine dream, but they flee when the golden morning pries its way into my eyes. I take a deep breath. I smell the remnants of your presence lingering in the air: bacon, coffee, herbal shampoo. The house is quiet except for settling noises, the hum of the refrigerator, the clock ticking, and the wind brushing against the window. It is all quiet. I roll to your side of the bed, wrapping the sheet around me like a caterpillar spinning a cocoon. Your pillow smells like you. I bury my face in it.

Everything I have worked for I have lost. How can I work more than forty hours a week and still have my home taken from me? Two years back sub prime meant nothing to me; now I wish I never heard them. I feel sick in my stomach when I think of the kids. The bank still sits all splendid down on 9th St.

I’ve got a gun. Maybe I’ll go and find a convenience store and get me some cash. Maybe I’ll make and end of the kids and me. Maybe I’ll throw it in the river. God help me.

We were the most innovative pair of pubescent hooligans east of the Mississippi. It was your idea to tie an oversized stuffed teddy bear to a giant makeshift crucifix in the back yard just to see the neighbor’s reaction.

The bear, with its head lolling to one side and its tongue sticking from its mouth, sat out in the rain for three days before anyone noticed. Then we were simply asked to take it down. It was very anticlimactic. We were disappointed so we set the entire creation on fire. I don’t think that’s what they meant by “take it down”.