-
Crouching In a Room Full of Spiders
About 6 months ago, I finally read Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I could write a series of separate essays analyzing its themes, but here I will focus on the motif I found most singularly resonant: the image of a cramped and squalid room. Raskolnikov spends much of the novel in his tiny apartment, Continue reading
-
I Hate It When It Gets Cold
I hate it when it gets cold. I do not say this because I’m from Southern California, where cold weather is spoken about like a foreign war. I went to college in Utah and now live in Washington, and while I feel great nostalgia for the smokey scent of the chapparal and sagebrush in the… Continue reading
-
The Promise
There was a chasm. It looked unassuming from the surface. It was round and very large. The village’s strongest swimmer took longer to cross it than the divers could hold their breath, though such a test was seldom done, for it was inauspicious for the living to enter its waters. That maw of deep, twilight Continue reading
-
Leaves Falling Away
They never saw me coming: that was the nature of my work. They did not hear the shriek of my craft tearing past their position, nor the roar of the missile volley I fired at their satellite. Sound does not travel in space, but rockets do. I wondered what those final moments looked like. What Continue reading
-
To the Bereaved
Only twice in my life have I met someone like you. Twice, I foolishly thought I might be able to provide some kind of comfort or peace. Twice, I was reminded that I am still but a child: powerless, lost, and afraid. Twice, I was guided back by you. Speaking to someone experiencing profound sorrow Continue reading
-
A Neon Rain
Ever since I was a kid, I hated performing. The lights were always too damn bright, and I suffered from terrible stage fright. You know, the kind that gets you all clammy and tense and your fingers get stiff. Then you miss a note nobody noticed, a pang of anxiety blasts through your entire body Continue reading
-
Troubles
Though I am an old man now, ‘The Troubles’ is still my life. Derry is where I was born, and Derry is where I will die. Derry has bled enough for a lifetime. When my granddaughter last visited, I took her for a stroll around the city. She’s a curious thing, that girl, and already Continue reading
-
Sediment
The town slept in a valley beneath a twinkling sky. The mountains stood stalwart and still, and only a single gust of wind blew down their rocky slopes, carrying the invisible blanket to swathe the night in silence. The crickets did not chirp, the frogs did not croak, the birds did not sing; the earth Continue reading
-
Phantasms on the Shore
The child watched them, wide-eyed, saying nothing. Just as Sirris had said, they began to rise from the lake: translucent, amorphous creatures, as if life had been granted to the mist which gathered upon its surface on gray mornings. One by one, they drifted into the night sky, carried forth by some unseen, ordered wind Continue reading
-
A Mother’s Love
She woke in a familiar stupor. The blankets which swaddled her body seemed also to envelop her mind in warmth, drawing her back to sleep, but though she was too tired to remember where she was, enough of her remained alert to sense an incongruity between her memory and the space she sensed beyond her Continue reading