It starts like this, the saddest story I know does. It starts with me and it starts with my son.
“You’re damned if you do and damned if you won’t”
The ferry man asked, Where is its mom? I am his mother!
Jack Beauregard divides his time into zeroes and ones. He divides his time between mundane tasks and the question of whether he is worth loving.
We go to a bar for lunch that serves free candy.
I am a hoarder trying to salvage pieces.
Is it ok to bite the hand that feeds you if the food is mostly rubber?
Jared punches like dang. Gouges, arm-bars. Breaks windows at theme parties.
For the past month Wrat, a man removed from the dogtooth of language, had been hearing a scratching, needling noise clip the outmost walls.
I put on underpants and pants and socks and shirts in the same sequence every day
I was retroactively making a story out of a time in my life when I was interested in writing, wanted to ‘be a writer’, but didn’t necessarily have the skills or direction to actually pull it off.
On the job site one morning they found a dead squirrel. There was no indication of what had killed it.
But the true malevolence of Majka’s world—the thing that traps her characters in a state of lifelong discontent—most often manifests in mundane hauntings: regret and remorse, vanished love and vanished youth, feelings of dislocation and the inability to belong
I understand this. This is what made me psychic. This is what makes images arrive on the doorstep with a bindle over the shoulder made of red bandana. Each man is the last man.
When my team scores a touchdown, I have a few seconds in the spotlight to do my dance, to captivate the crowd. I pretend in front of my flock that I don’t enjoy it but I do. I am more vain than I let on
I’d’ve led him by the wrist. Still but blinding four pm/ back home blazed against the glass.
Christopher Boucher’s new novel, Golden Delicious (Melville House), is a kind of referendum on all we presently hold dear in fiction. Its emotional hold on the reader is very strong, but its avant-garde methods critique those special effects by explaining what they’re doing to your feelings while they do it, which somehow only makes the book more sad.
Under haze of junior-prom fog machines,
my cells pulsed with
non-senescence
Your hand had never fully formed, a shadow made of lint & oil. Decades pass, divination is still predicated on how long a candle lasts, how long tea sits in a cup. Coffee? I never touch the stuff.
Acting isn’t enough anymore. They should have to hurt themselves.
Mama Vincenzo’s Ristorante Italiano is located in hell
