Category: Fiction

Well I had to drown myself in the sink or else I’d look foolish. The hockey team, those that saw more ice than bench, anyway, was packed into Max “Guts” Guzowski’s half bath, and I was staring at the toothpasty basin and its long black hairs that could have been his sister Nikki’s if she…

Rather like the placement of a parlor chair relative to the fire, window, and bookshelf, a ghost’s choice of haunt is an intimate decision requiring exactitude and not a little wiggling about. The world has few caves or abbeys left for secret lurking. One could make a cozy living between the cobwebbed stacks of CDs…

It would have to be the varnish. The night would be warm without need of brandy, and Mama always said he could do with less. He would not use the whole pail of varnish, but that final coat would seal the skiff true, and he could not justify another missed night-drift on account of brandy,…

The water turned pink over my ankles. He shouldn’t have been there, Contreras. Didn’t mean he deserved it. And the strength! I knew I had anger, but not the swinging ability to kill a man with it. Girl versus man—how many urban nightmares pitted the two against each other, a hundred-pound Daphne in diamond heels…

They had room to play tag, an old sofa and card table, and a TV. If the TV didn’t do it, they would have to sit in their imaginations until dinner was over and they were allowed back upstairs. Upstairs was a crown of light where the grown-ups floated in watery colors and shrieks of…

The lines of the parking lot were old and broken. In this row there were no vacancies and the Volvo sat between two station wagons with stickered tailgates. Cooling the Volvo was the shadow of the visors lowered to catch the glare of the sun and the electronic marquee of the outlet strip ahead. The…