The minute you leave
I summon the sea,
Search Results for: sea change
The Theory of Everything
We sailed from our homeport at Charleston Naval Base in June of 1999 en route a three-month deployment to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea
The Has Been, The Dancer, The Invader
Daphne’s left rib glistened with aquasoft, a thin layer over her fresh tattoo, an outline of a maple tree.
Some Things I Used To Remember
We never spoke of my father. Nobody did. Her first marriage was strictly off limits. When I finally did build up the nerve to ask about him, she abruptly told me that her current husband was my father.
Chain-Link Fences and Barbed-Wire Regret
The first thing you need is a friend or family member who gets sentenced to prison.
In Sickness and in Health
Floyd’s memory was like a hornet caught in a Mason jar. He stood in the hallway after lunch, still in his pajamas, staring at the residue of his former self.
Sweet Cheeks
“I’m lovely,” she says and pulls a jewelry box from under the coffee table. From the box she takes out a needle, a spoon, and a baggie filled with a dull white powder.
The Zombie (Lady) with the Dog
It was said that a new zombie had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog.
At Christmas Time with Zombies
… we counsel you take up the rifle against the undead which plague our town. Clawing up from the muddy ground in Spring, these ravaged men, women, and alas, children, have overrun the churchyard…
A Perfect Ass
You were staring at my ass, weren’t you?
An Old Song
It’s hard to come down without being seen from a flight through the clouds on the back of an albino dragon.
Pizza Western
As a marketing copywriter, my greatest talent is my ability to uncover my client’s story and communicate it in a compelling manner, no matter how boring.
Compartmentalizing
I am becoming immune to body-counts, to the number of people who have been maimed or killed by bombings and drone attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen.
This Wasn’t Supposed to Happen
We were the infantry, the sons of Odin, the winged gods of war fighting for freedom and the American way of life. Now we’re dying in the streets of America. We survived war; it was the peace that killed us.
Maggie and Milly and Molly and May
It begins with the false spring: warm fog and a thin film of rain always on the skin. A February thaw is sweetly cold like ice cream and doesn’t smell at all like the real thing.
Broke
The road rolled out flat and endlessly into the barren landscape. The parched ground coughed up sagebrush and broken rock, an unforgiving comfort you had to look for. Beauty, as they say out here, plays hard to get.
A Brief History of the Universe
She came with another female soldier on a sunny afternoon. It was Saturday and I was on the ladder, cleaning the leaves out of the second-story gutters.
Introduction
When I think of fall, I remember warm, sugared donuts and fresh cider from a farm in Michigan. Fall brings a sense of renewal as my life remains rooted in the world of education. A new school year, a new beginning, and in that way Fall trades on the goodwill of Spring.
Preparatory Meditations
In this season
Of hollow October light,
For The Days
We grow inside houses, and remember each spring
how it seeped through the flooring –
bringing such thoughts, a cracking of dust –
Corben Dennis’s Dad’s Gone Mad
Eyes are elsewhere. So no-one sees the child at loose in the street, dodging bin and lamppost and striking the pavement with stinging feet. A phantom manifesting; thunder through open windows, as a flash of colour, sudden, in the doors of shops and houses. No stopping for traffic as he cuts across a car park,… Read more »
My Lost One
“Surprised to see me again?” Kim says. I hesitate at the door. Paper wasps had built a nest in the corner of the brick underpass leading to my ground floor apartment in Levittown. Anyone standing at the door stirs them up, so I part my threshold and invite her to follow. Kim slips into the… Read more »
Through the Woven Door
As she wakes Linka feels the hopeless weight of failure at the discovery of another month’s flow seeping from her body. The flush glazed her thighs and stained the snow-white linen of her nightgown a fierce geranium red. Linka has longed for a child since she was a child. Even her daydreams are filled with… Read more »
No Milk Would Come
The other night I stopped for orange juice at the Pico station on the north side of Boerne, and I picked up this men’s magazine just to browse it, and then I wound up buying it because of this article about sex dolls so realistic you could dress them up and no one would know… Read more »