Lenny let another rock fly from his slingshot toward the ancient weeping willow just on the other side of the fence. A flurry of little songbirds took to the sky.
Lenny used to be fun, but now all he wanted to do was shoot things. Through the kitchen window, Maribel could see her mother with the coffee pot and Lenny’s mom holding up her cup. She wished they would hurry up.
“Aren’t you scared you’ll hit an angel?” Maribel asked. “I saw a picture in the paper of an angel that got shot by a hunter.”
Lenny lowered his shooting arm and turned to face her. “My dad said that picture was fake. And anyway, I’ve never seen an angel around here.” He scanned the yard looking for his next rock.…
...continue reading
I see glittered carriages sprinkled through Central Park
being pulled by horses that remind me of the Midwest,
not the steroid-juiced, blender-bred racetrack specimens,
not the ponies that granddaughters of Fortune 500 CEOs
have grown out of, but something in between
Hell’s Kitchen and Times Square
in an alley repurposed as a stable
I can smell before I can see,
a single AC unit
jutting out the only window,
a stallion with his sun-stuffed
snout pressed against the cool air,
legs stomping in the mildest satisfaction
interrupted by the stablemen
who guide it back into a steamy prison,
and I hear my friend complain,
“They aren’t supposed to live like that,”
and only then do I consider
these obvious snippets of suffering.
– Dylan Tran…
...continue reading
Because the instructions said a dark cool place with absolutely no sunlight and because the boy and girl were young enough to believe in shadows, they buried the seeds in a shoebox and the shoebox beneath the basement stairs of her parents’ house. Because the instructions said uninterrupted and six to eight weeks and because the boy and girl were young, they soon forgot about the shoebox and the two seeds planted inside and went about growing up. For years the girl grew up pretty. The boy grew up fast and mean and tired of the girl for a time, as boys sometimes do. The girl’s parents were already grown up, so they grew old and grew out of the girl’s childhood home. The boy would remember the girl sadly.…
...continue reading
Turns out, when you die, you are judged by a council of dogs. If you find yourself surprised by this, I challenge you to think of a better system.
They sit on high, in judgment upon you, from behind an elevated white marble desk.
You know their names at once, because they have personalized name plates in front of them — along with open notebooks and capless pens, plus a bowl of water each, and platters piled high with bacon bits and bite-size chunks of filet mignon. The dogs sit with dignity on cushioned chairs. There are seven of them: Pride, Greed, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth.
Sloth and Wrath are eating, and Envy sips at her water. Gluttony, notably, is not touching his food.…
...continue reading
She sits across, lounges across really, the length of the wide red sofa chair. Her calves, ankles, feet dangle over the armrest. Her head and neck scrunch, xylophone style, against the other side. She plays cats’ cradle with a loose string of yarn she found in the apartment lobby. She hasn’t paid attention to the last half hour of the movie. A Western, her friend recommended. It is number 47 on Ramona’s must watch movies list.
She doesn’t watch the movies in order. She actually had never noticed they were numbered until tonight. She had watched another Western last weekend, Dances with Wolves, and felt like she should stick to the genre. She hadn’t stuck to the genres before, either, but she had also never seen a Western before.…
...continue reading
I discovered Nirvana on classic rock radio during my early morning drives to work after Hurricane Katrina and the flooding from the breached levees decimated New Orleans in 2005. I’d completely missed the grunge wave in the 90s. Back then, I spent long days in a medical practice working with sick patients, stubborn insurance companies, and overworked hospital clinicians. In addition, I was dealing with infertility treatments that ended in disappointment after disappointment for a lot of the decade. I put more stress on myself by sneaking outside to smoke, an old habit I picked back up thinking it would calm me. Overwhelm was a dark cloud overhead as I struggled to cope.
Popular culture, including the hottest music of the time, wasn’t on my radar.…
...continue reading
I’m minding my own business when I walk right into the path of my double—my own doppelgänger.
Everyone is supposed to have one, you know. And mine, well, I’m a little disappointed that she isn’t as pretty as I like to think I am. She has some flaws, and they’re obvious right away. Her nose is a little bit offline, for one thing. And she’s wearing red cat-eye glasses—I wear contacts—that sit a little bit crooked on that crooked nose. She’s also dressed with no style whatsoever, not at all rocking the saggy brown wool coat, in my opinion, and the thrift-shop flowered blouse. Her jeans are threadbare. Her hair is a bird’s nest of frizzy Miss Clairol Shimmering Sands Blonde.
We look at each other.…
...continue reading