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Peter Jones and Tisha Box
7 AM: The shrill alarm rings and demands that I rise. My eyes are heavy with denied sleep. My tongue is a matted carpet of cheap booze and vomit, and the film that covers my teeth is thick and greasy. I reach for the glass of water that’s been beside my bed for three days. The dust that floats on the top is like the layer that covers my soul. 8
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Rifts in a River
A waterfall tumbled down over a steep cliff into a circular pool carved out of the ancient rock over millennia of erosion. It was a perfect day, the sun high in the sky, the spray from the waterfall glistening in the bright light, a faint rainbow spanning the pool. Mid-afternoon, the splashing of the
The Thing About His Eyes
The thing about his eyes is that they were never the same twice. I’d stared into his so long and so intently, I ought to have learned them, but I hadn’t. I was constantly caught off guard. The way his skin crinkled at the corners when he smiled, just a tiny bit. The way I could never be truly angry
Manners
Ma witnessed us fighting at Easter dinner, a small argument over how to cook candied yams, but it wasn’t just a fight to Ma, she must’ve seen a way to exorcise her own ghosts from her relationship with Pa, and she began calling me every week to quiz me on my marriage, which didn’t take Sylvia long
The Lodger
While Peter was working I would go down the stairs and do his wife. I could not help myself. I tried to stop. I locked myself in my room. I even insulted her. I called her terrible names. I tried sleep, masturbation, lack of sleep, abstention. I obscured time with loud music, I went for longs walks,
On the Couch
On the couch you sit and read the paper. The paper tells you the news. The news says someone gunned down the family who sat together into the night talking drinking smoking and laughing on the front porch. The front porch was added onto the house by Great-grandfather. Great-grandfather was crippled years
BJ Dreaming
When you work in publishing, you tend to be surrounded by women most of the time. I don’t know what it is, but they seem to make better editors. I have a hunch that it has something to do with how having one less extremity to compete with their brain for blood helps them concentrate better. Anyways,
René
René was his name. I mean, the name of the boy and the name of the grandfather. René – the boy – had a dream, six months before it happened. He was ten years old and he saw René – the grandfather – from the waist up, smiling at him engulfed in flames, in the fireplace he’d built himself. You
EXCERPT: Rock My Socks Off
SYNOPSIS: Writer Jacob Hastings is uninspired by his latest assignment: a museum full of hideous rocking horses. But his socks are rocked by Normandie Stephens, a mischievous astronomer who can match his dry wit, quip for quip, and his sexual appetite, frolic for frolic, with energy to spare. Thanks
Crowbar
I keep a crowbar by my bed, easily within arm’s reach. I can have it ready at a moment’s notice. I bought it on a whim, almost as a joke. In a book I once read, you see, it was suggested that a crowbar is the best of all possible weapons in the zombie apocalypse, as it doesn’t need
