Love Doesn’t Pay Bills For Vampires
I asked Mother if she loved me. Mother said love didn’t pay the bills, not even for vampires. She said it with a sad pause. She taught American and European literature (except for Dracula). Wrote stories. Took me to school. She wore a clipped smile, except when telling awkward jokes about dead poets, sucking blood […]
The butterfly effect
The day Zach was suspended because of that little shit, he headed straight for the woods. Every day for three months he’d been driving the school route with no trouble until that little sod took the usual yahooing too far and refused to sit down and stop swearing. So Zach slammed the brakes on and […]
Today is Good
It begins with a soup shop on a rainy day. The rain is as important as the soup shop, especially to the land because we’ve been in drought for years and the farmers have started to wilt and crumple like the grass. You know how grass looks almost okay from a distance, but you get […]
The Scientist and the Magician
Elena carries around a pill box dispenser in the shape of the periodic table of elements. Each little compartment contains a small but different pill. When we head out for dinner, she’s discreet about her pill popping despite nothing being discreet about a woman in fine health carrying a pill box with 118 minuscule compartments. […]
(d), (d), (d)
I tell my ninety-two-year-old mother I’m moving to a small village in the Andalusian mountains. Although she has Skype and an iPad, I know I will most likely never see her in person again. Does she… (a) clap her hands and suggest we open the Tesco prosecco she’s been storing since I was born. (b) […]
Way to Go
When notified of their impending demise, the couple deleted the forms. Who didn’t in those early, incredulous days? Undaunted, The Easement sent symptoms: fever, chills, piercing pains. Then options. Shivering, costly meds nearly gone, the couple scrolled: Cliff, Lava, Ocean, Amber. “Amber!” Wife croaked. “That story in the news. Two prehistoric flies, caught in ‘the […]
Time Travel and Woolly Mammoths
I invented a time machine. It was an accident. I was trying to repair my phone after I dropped it down the stairs. The next thing I know I traveled back in time. It was freezing and ice formed on my nose and mouth. A woolly mammoth followed me back. I wasn’t trying to find a woolly mammoth […]
Puzzling
It wasn’t that Luna was exceptionally large or exceptionally small or oddly-shaped in any way, but while others snapped together easily, slowly revealing the life for which they had been created, no matter where she found herself, she simply did not fit. Ballet classes meant to teach her grace found her toppling to the floor […]