Archive | fiction

  Christmas was coming. The rent was past due. A pile of chocolate colored powder lay on the table by the back window of the loft, a former machine shop with solid concrete floors and ceiling. Soundproof, bullet proof.  Photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine and manuscript pages were randomly pinned and taped to the walls. A […]

We wore flouncy halter tops and ran from the boys who wanted to see if we had tits underneath. “Suckers!” We yelled, and ran down the block, back to my house. We went around to the side door and down into the cellar where it was cool. “Let’s take a rest,” said Renae. Plum fuzz […]

OK, so I’m in Joe the Art of Coffee, the one on 13th Street near Union Square, it’s early Saturday morning, like 8 or 9, and this is the first thing that was kind of odd, because it’s a popular place, and typically there’s a bunch of people in there at that time — at […]

First I remember the silence. I remember the silence before I remember the noise even though the noise came before the silence. It was bone-chilling. It was hair-raising. It was blood-curdling. At one point, my friend turned to me and said, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, till human voices wake us and we drown.”

Sunlight, shadow, sunlight again, washing over her, pouring through her windshield, darkness creeping behind it, but she maintained the important distinctions, road and not-road, until her diligence led her to an office building in a corporate park. She walked toward big glass doors reflecting an almost pastoral world behind her. She realized that she didn’t […]

Everything is coming in waves today. You can’t remember the last time you felt like this. For months now you’ve been buried under a glacial sheet, all light faded. Only momentary glimmers burn through where you warm up and feel anything at all. But now a thawing has begun.

The blue of night meets no resistance with the dawn, going from darkness into faint early morning light. It is a new day. But it is also like any other day, only slightly different. The day he died was like any other, only shorter, thought Carmel. There is no hope and yet I remain the […]

I find the number on a big black door. It’s a horror movie type of door. The kind that the girl pushes open and walks through, even though everybody in the audience is saying: “Don’t go in there.” It’s the early 80s and New York is still scary, especially these dark empty streets below Houston. […]