I cy wind rattled the coffee shop windows. The string of fairy lights outside the storefront shook, striking the glass in a repeating tink, tink, tink, like the drumming of skeletal fingers. Darkness came early this time of year, but the shop was lit with the soft glow of many stained-glass lamps. It felt safe. […]
T here was no room for fear at the circus. As infants, my sister Jenny and I learned to walk by balancing our child-soft legs on the gravity-defying materials of tightwires and bouncing ropes. We were birds, a fear of tumbling
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I wake to the sound of bleating. What the fuck? While still half asleep, I crawl out of bed at–what–2:36 am? I grab my phone and the Swiss Army knife I keep on the bedside table and lumber down the stairs. I make as much noise as possible to scare any
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A woodsman gave me a ride for the last few miles. He was surprised to find a young woman on the mountain path. “You’re a student?” he said. “From Piarista gymnazium,” I said. “Where the witch burning happened last week,” he said. “Awful stuff.” We passed through small settlements; the path wound up through the
W hen P-XIE refused to justify her surgery, the reporter asked if it was so she could marry a fish. Her publicist cut the interview off. But that became the story. Pop Icon Gone Fishing: Are Real Men Not Good Enough for P-XIE? Three months later, on a sun-soaked Saturday afternoon outside Saint Louis,
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D avid loved untaxed Bauhaus steel. Especially when it was at a Vancouver 6.7 percent discount. If he included the security envelope with fifty one-dollar bills, the total cost of two coffee tables, a new kitchen table, and matching bedside lamps was $9,650. Sure, his five-year-old daughter, Elise–who he’d coached not to say a word
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A tough call—Strawberry Lemonade or Wild Cherry? I had heard rumors last semester but until now didn’t believe them. Rachel Roth, who was three inches taller than any boy in the 6th grade, supposedly ordered Norm Chance and Randy Gibson to “go shopping.” There was only one
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I used to be a bird. My mother never hid this fact from me. She told me as soon as I was old enough to understand. At the time, this made complete sense. Children are much more accepting of the impossible. I nodded as she prepared my breakfast, sunlight streaming through the window blinds and
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S he had no fear of the bubbles. They caressed her skin more softly than she guessed as she sank deeper. The cold burned at first, scalding her arms, cheeks, ears, yet she dove farther under the surface and into the frigid water. The current stripped her sweater off her arms as she swam, the
T he truth glistens in its glass jar as I lift it down from its hiding place on the top shelf. My customer eyes it hungrily as I take her smaller jar and remove its lid. The young woman wears her hood low and speaks little–I do not ask her name.
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