She Walked in Beauty Like the Night (or at Least I’m Pretty Sure)
There was a time when her face made me panic. And when it did that was highly unlike me; for back then, I was yet at the height of what I’d thought was my lasting good fortune with women. In short, I was a very big fish in a tiny pond that was polluted by drugs and whiskey. Now, though, things have drastically altered. It’s eight years later, and Cormac McCarthy has already used the title I’d like to use for my biography. Because let me assure you, reader: No Country for Old Men best describes being thirty when you live in a college town. And the college town in question? Well...
Read MoreMaureen and Sylvia
Gary Garfield and Fuzzy Mariano were sitting in Fuzzy’s basement living room discussing what to do that summer Saturday morning — Fuzzy sprawled on the couch, his feet on the coffee table, and Gary in the Barcalounger, fully reclined, staring at the ceiling tiles. There were two weeks left in the summer of 1957 before they would be high school freshmen, no longer boys, almost men. Only two weeks, but it might as well have been a year and a day, because Gary and Fuzzy lived life as it came, and two weeks from today was the distant future. Fuzzy and Gary thought about girls, cars, and...
Read MoreStrays
It was a good day to fleece treats off the customers coming out of the 7-Eleven. The hot weather brought them in for beer and chips, and I sat outside pretending to be someone’s pet dog by sitting calmly and looking like I was waiting for my master to return from inside the store with a six-pack for him and a bone for me. Pet dogs were safe to feed. Moms didn’t have to worry about their kids trying to talk them into bringing home the stray. “Don’t feed the stray,” they’d say. “He’ll follow us home.” I’d heard that one a lot. So I put on my act of belonging...
Read MoreThe Heartbreak of Long Division
Sam Grieve was born in Cape Town and lived in Paris and London prior to settling down in Connecticut. She has a BA from Brown University and an MA from King’s College London. She has worked as a writer, librarian, bookseller and antiquarian book dealer, and consequently has never found a home with enough bookshelves. She is published in the current issue of A cappella Zoo and has work forthcoming in Grey Sparrow. She is married, has two sons and a dog, and an extended family who live far away over the sea. ~~~ Our father was dead. A month before, he had suffered a heart...
Read MoreOpere Roma
The Queen of Cups A few days after I was born, my mother decided to tuck me into a very crowded recycling bin outside of a Ft. Lauderdale firehouse. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and lucky for me the guys of Ladder 35 were trying to have a very eco-friendly holiday. Esperanza, my social worker, always loved to tell me that story whenever another set of foster parents decided that I was damaged goods. On the scale of adoptable and desirable children, being an antisocial prepubescent black boy always lands you somewhere between the crack babies and the kids that play with matches....
Read MoreAnalog
It was a typical Saturday night for Arthur, the twenty-one-year-old clerk who was crouched on the floor behind the counter of Video Deluxe, sorting through a cardboard box of old promotional items – posters, yes, but also stickers, pins, hats, even a thermos – while his teenage coworker Delia stood poised at the register, ready to attend to the town’s video rental needs. Arthur was looking down at an enormous pin promoting a Jim Carrey movie. “Wouldn’t people be more likely to pin this to something if it were smaller?” he asked Delia. She smirked, but before she could respond, a...
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