What if I waved my arms around in circles and kicked my feet like I was treading water? The sky resembled a receding ocean in oil-blue. It made my eyes swim.
*
I sat in the La-Z-Boy®, smoking cigarettes like …
The porch light was on, and the brown, two-story craftsman house looked welcoming. A rubber ball lay on the lawn, and someone had scribbled on the walkway with colorful chalk. Pink and yellow flowers flanked the porch steps, and a …
Suzie Morgan was the first kid to disappear. It was hot out, and the fields were full of grasshoppers. The big ones that didn’t just jump, but they also flew away from you when you tried to catch them. And …
The automaton’s ivory fingers danced across the harpsichord keys with a precision that would’ve made Vivaldi weep. A delicate trill here, a diabolical chromatic scale there, major and minor notes clamoring over each other like rioting primadonnas. Musically, it was …
“Mishibizhiw is the great lynx or the wildcat of the sea,” my mother explained as she stuffed a pack of cigarettes into my duffle bag, cellophane crinkling against army green nylon. I was just about to remind her I didn’t …
Kelvin rubbed the V-shaped cut in his forehead as he limped into his home. Meg dropped her dish and ran to him, “What happened, Kelvin?”
“I sneezed on the bus. They called me a ‘virus boy’ and threw me out.”…
I
This Saturday, Zihao woke up and kept his eyes closed to let the sound in. Trained on the four tones of his native Mandarin language, Zihao’s ears could pick out the subtlest shades in a welter of everyday noises …
“What is it with you and married women?” Ed Solomon asked Marcus Coleman the morning after the band they were filling in with played a weekend at a club in Baltimore.
“You don’t know?” replied Marcus.
“Know what?”
“They appreciate …
We’d barely gotten through the cottage door before I felt Grandma’s claws digging into both shoulders. I hadn’t minded her grabbing me from behind like that when I was a kid. Her towering over me, hands on my shoulders, had …
Some of the guys feigned party animal personalities: shirts carefully disheveled, pretending to love beer, chest-bumping high fives when someone said something about a woman, any woman (likely not present, they’d be too afraid to say anything that might actually …