Euphony

There are dead men in the bushes, she thinks, right by where I walk the dog. Dead rich men killed by goblin boys. Thin, wiry boys, strung out on greed and miscellaneous wanga. Breath burned by that crazy smoke. Lips, cracked and dry, marked with tender pipe sores. Smelling a sweet, plumy scent like a cold shiver up your spine. Read more »

I sent my guinea pigs ahead of me with the friend of a friend. He was going to Portland and came to pick them up on Friday afternoon in a corroded green station wagon that was missing a fender. There was barely enough room in the trunk, on account of the mountains of old books, so we had to move half of them to the front seat. We wedged the cage between stacks of Kerouac and Faulkner because I wanted them to feel at home. “The next time we see each other,” I whispered to them before I shut the trunk, “you can tell me all about romanticism.” Read more »

A story of our post-9/11 Great Depression. This piece is an eery and all-too-telling portrait of today’s Americana. —The Editors

The laundry, off a side street, has a small sign over the front door that says Capeti & Brothers. It’s a large, two-story building with no windows. From inside comes the roar of machines. Read more »

In my half-sleep, I hear the tattling sounds of a key unlocking the front door, a tipsy stumble up the stairs, the soft hush of the bathroom door closing, and then the adolescent tell of muffled retching. I surface slowly from unconsciousness, exasperated but relieved that whatever escapade my daughter Caro has been up to this time hasn’t killed her. My foot searches the folds of sheet and blanket next to me, until I realize that the depression in the shape of my husband’s form is cool and empty.

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“I don’t want to know what it was ‘like’, I want to know what it was.”

When the detective with the crooked jaw and prom king blue eyes says this to me, I want to punch him in the throat.  Apparently, he lacks an appreciation for metaphor because what I said was “it was like a symphony of orange and white, dancing, mocking us as we watched our life disappear into little black specks of nothingness.”  I know, it was a bit elaborate, but I couldn’t help myself.  What it was; was a fire.  One that I started, but he doesn’t know that.  He doesn’t ask his arrogant questions because he suspects anything.  I am flawless and practiced.  He asks his questions because he is simple.  But I still want to punch him in the throat.  Instead I look at him, calm and confused.

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Lucy believes—the way she trusts gravity, getting old, being lonely—that she does not matter in this world. If she could talk to me, writing her, she could not form the words to ask for help, because she does not grasp the lie at the center of her Self. I want so much to save Lucy, but I don’t know how. Read more »