Anger cloaked him. Draped in folds. You could see it. Smell it. Hear air quivering. Like hornets. Like cymbals. Terrifying. Sensual. On the day the world ended Ike Steel scoffed from his penthouse. Glaring down. Like God. As chaos consumed streets. He was still. But for the ever-trembling rage. Scotch in hand. Despising it all….
Tag: Flash Fiction
Spume Law
Whole street’s screaming drunk for the duration of the weekend. Taking it in turns to vomit outside the pub. Kids smash empties on the road. There is an air of abandon here. Across the tracks the trash spills like lava down the embankment. The train rumbles by and hardly anyone glances out the carriage. They…
Steel Lattice in a High Voltage Place
There’s a place I stand in the woods with tree-lined eyes. I stand there sometimes below several high steel bodies. Electrical towers humming–six arms and long cords attaching like long thin sperm poised to eat each other’s ends. The towers need these bonds. It’s their kissing and talking. When humans want to communicate they just…
Sweeten
Almost sternly, disapprovingly he was saying it’s so important to vote, you really owe it to all the women who struggled so that you could, you owe it to yourself. And although she didn’t want to shatter this little world they’d created, this fort with walls of misspelled menus, this moat of black coffee, there…
Diagram of a Life
There’s something about a man led around by his dick. The arrested, slop-licking gaze, the ever-attentiveness, dick forward–my father is such a man. Maybe that’s why I can spot them, men and women leashed to some kind of compulsion, drinking, say, or eating, or even health. Give me five minutes and I’ll give you your…
The Derelict
From under the bridge she watched the patrol boat scud upstream, leaving on the river a long scar. She loathed these boats, sly in the water and always talking, loud-speakers squawking. She gathered spit and slugged it into the mud. It sat on top of the scummy layer of ice, glistening. Winter was a fist…
A Memory
I saw a car-wreck while crossing the Mojave Desert one oven-summer twilight before I was old. It shut down a four-lane highway, eastbound and west; twisted metal sank into sand between black shrubs and the Wile-E-Coyote orange rock backdrop. I was touring with a testosterone punk-band back then; tattooed Californians who only surfed at night….
Lost Jacket Blues
The last time I saw it it was stepping off the curb between two parked cars in Cleveland, its pockets empty but for her hands, its top button loose and dangling like the head of a hanged Nazi, though others swear they’ve since seen it from behind and in the somber company of rain, notwithstanding…
An Ever Widening Distance
Nicola squeals when Dean enters her. He takes this as his cue to really go for it. And he does: ramming hard, enjoying the smacking sounds his flesh makes against hers, the feel of his balls swinging under him. He hooks his fingers around her hipbones to get a better purchase and repositions himself on…
Flight
Confronted by the dusty outline of a bird hitting the glass, wings spread into a wide quarter-moon, feather marks still visible where it struck—This is enough to ruin everything. This is enough to press “Stop” and rewind your song indefinitely, but then you start thinking: If you had to be a bird, you would be…