She Doesn’t Wait For Everyone

Wendy pours coffee into a foam cup for a man who reads the paper with his back against the lowest window of a skyscraper. She sits in the wings of the community theater and watches her friends pace around in costumes and have fake arguments about made up people. She waits on a bench with […]

Innovation

Streetlights, that turn the air around you blue, hum quietly beside you as you balance on the steep and narrow curb. I spin a knife in my hand while I think and barely notice when I finally cut my thumb. You tell me I should try to sleep, and I explain how I’m planning to […]

Fireproof Upsides

The salamander felt nothing on the burning paper plate at the top of the trash can. It burned down through the plastic then calmly the lizard just waited for it all to be ash. When finally burned it gave up on the grass feeling something close to understanding. It was safer in the fire so […]

Boredom, The Ever Present Excuse

People have dismissive conversations over carryout fast food, and when they throw their balled up wrappers toward the garbage they always seem to miss in such a way that the wind takes whatever they thought they were killing, and puts it somewhere no one tries to chase it. One of them is wearing small circular […]

Sand

People ignore what they don’t want to handle. Like small things their friends say that worry them, or the empty buildings that grow ever more common, moving closer by the day to where you find yourself. One day the tide will be amplified by the narrow spaces between coastal skyscrapers that only the insane will […]

Ice Time

A collapsed fire pit made out of broken cinder blocks is surrounded by empty containers nobody cared to gather. The wind spreads all the refuse through the streets. Patio seating where flies go swimming in stout beers and are dissolved by all the alcohol so the drinker just tastes the carnage as part of the […]

Something Easy To Look At

Concrete leaves decorate the stone work around the fountain and the archways above the doors, but all cosmetics end where the building meets the sidewalk. Things are put places by something even if it’s happenstance. Old cars made of thicker metal, with tires so much paler than the ones we put on minivans and buses, […]