Job (A Primer)
Winter comes ‘round every once in a while to remind you that you got no one to keep you warm. All that cold breath gives you a cover for your shiverin’ and keepin’ to yourself and holdin’ your books real tight and stayin’ inside. These nights the black chill comes on real quick—and darker than [...]
Dead Languages Don’t Soften the Blow
Nights were the hardest. After the sun settled behind confection homes, dark seeped in like monoxide and him here alone in a house full of mirrors again. The bourbon cap: another kept treasure lost, now only to physical reach. White-collared shirt undone two buttons down and his tie with slack, pressed against the back of [...]
Dreams Old Men Dream
If I am an old man now, then I‘m also a child. My crumpled hands strain across white hospital sheets, glide across white hospital sheets, then fresh, pale, sickly. The children all around me clutch recycled stuffed animals with yearning to live. We old men talk about the war. It’s funny, the way death follows [...]
Casualties of War, or: Midnight in Manhattan
He leaned in with his stool, hunched over the bar counter and staring deep into the oblivion he’d managed to contain in a glass of double-whiskey and coke. Nietzsche once said that this kind of self-reflection might lead a man to discover himself as the most horrible thing he could conceive. But John wasn’t much [...]
