Refraction

I wait on the curb worried about how I look to everyone. I know logically no one is watching. They are focused on their destinations, and nagging nightmares in the shapes of tree branch shadows; cast by moonlight through their windows like a prism refracting dark. No one else is standing still. They are all […]

Tonight

The few people I pass by sitting in their crumbling cars breathing warm air into their hands, look at me and can see that tonight is different. I don’t look at my feet like I usually do, and the energy surrounding me is akin to the static in the wind after a lightning strike. The […]

Stain

I see a woman from my doorway painting the side of her house with her hands. She’s wearing a gray t-shirt with no logo and jeans that have a bleach stain in the shape of lake Michigan on the left thigh. It seems strange at first, but my attention quickly shifts when I notice a […]

Dashboard

Broken windshield wipers make the people drive slowly, and it doesn’t take long for someone to start seeing in distorted blurs to match the refracted mess above their dashboard. It’s hard to hold in when their angry sometimes, so they get drunk and drag around a opossum in a burlap sac. They do it only […]

Blisters

Blisters on our hands pop like bubble wrap, and the drive home is filled with clowns that like to lay down in the middle of the road and hope you don’t see them, but we do and are required by law not to give them the satisfaction of completing their joke. Everyone around me wears […]

The Splintered Dock

A fish flops on a splintered dock until the wood starts to rake the scales off its side. The fisherman is drunk and laughing at the top of his lungs, which are worn down from the residue of numerous cigars. Worms tangle themselves together in the bait box and believe wholeheartedly that Styrofoam is the […]

Chewed Up LEGOs

Mental breakdowns happen all the time. They tell me, anyway, but I know it’s not like that really. The buzzing of a building chock full of old air conditioners seeps out onto the streets and confuses the bugs and the birds. I hold onto memories of holding her, but I know those are nothing but […]