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Category: Stories

  • The Specialists

    I was to bring a box of Borges’s letters to floor minus-fourteen, wing six, for virtualization. Owing, perhaps, to some glitch in the transport tube, the placard on the wall where I stood said 14/6 instead of -14/6. For the first time in my life, I had left the Literature Prefecture. I wept. From the…

  • Things We Have Tried Unsuccessfully to Purchase on eBay

    Stephen and Laura sit at their shared teakwood desk. Stephen notices how the light from their 24” LCD monitor falls velvet on Laura’s cheek. They sit with bluish monitor light dancing in their eyes and lament that there are certain items they’re unable to purchase on eBay. The list is long and they have arrived…

  • My Fingernails

    A burning in the crevices of the crotch, trousers damp and reeking with a week’s worth of wear, feet rotten with mold — these conditions don’t bother me so much, but fingernails overgrown I can’t abide, and mine grow fast and thick, quick to yellow with chalky flecks, perhaps indicating yet some other deficiency. It’s…

  • Center of Population

    In here, loss is different. I learned this on my first visit. After I signed in at the front desk, I passed by a waiting area, where I saw a pregnant woman sifting through hunting and car magazines. Next to her, an older woman inspected her fingernails on one hand and rested her other hand…

  • Cloud

    Everything is covered in shit. When the birds first arrived, everyone was taking pictures. Jimmy and I rode our bikes down the streets, pointing at houses covered in starlings. They looked like oil slicks spreading from roof to roof. The trees were filled with their chirping babies and the sky would occasionally go dark when…

  • A Disturbance in the Herd Affects the Flock

    The enormous old man strode across the meadow through the snow. Where the meadow met the woods there was a dead deer hanging from its neck by a rope someone had tied to the lowest branch of an immense oak tree. The old man didn’t know what kind of sign it was, this thing left…

  • The Emperor’s Malady

    The maladies started the day after the Emperor was crowned: First a small sneeze. Then a cough that trembled his ribs. Soon a brightness burned in his throat and flared up to his eyes. From there the maladies grew. A twitching brow. A receding hairline and an itchy scalp, the latter producing dandruff that dusted…

  • Jacklight

    The buck lopes down the last stretch of hillside and bounds over the low fence behind the industrial park, hardly slowing, legs tucking up, body stretching out and arcing like an arrow, then coming down soft on the other side with just a faint ticking of hooves on the asphalt. The man stops and considers.…

  • Debris

    Davis chooses her for her scuffed eyes, which as he lifts the trash can lid meet his own with a look he can only describe as imploring. She lies prone, embedded between a wad of paper towels and a heap of moldy grapefruit skins, her arms reaching up: get me out of here. As he…

  • The Old Fire Eater, Downsized

    The old fire eater sits in a truck stop eating his lunch: egg sandwich, fries, a cup of coffee. He’s out, terminated, downsized, “I’m sorry, Silas. We’ve had a good run together, but people today, you know, they just don’t… we’re just heading in a new direction,” no severance, not even a ticket home. After…

  • The Worst Girl’s Best Day

    It was Fresh Family Farms day. I was a pig on hind legs, a woolly pink giant, but the girl’s mother wanted a picture. She posed us in front of the 60-roll packs of toilet paper. I did my friendliest pig pose: one hoof resting lightly on the girl’s shoulder, the other perched on my…

  • South of Hartford

    They’re stopped in traffic, just south of Hartford. Jenny, driving, is complaining about her mother’s vacuum cleaner. Dirk wants to listen to the World Cup pre-game show, buzzing in the car’s tinny speakers. Maybe, he thinks, I can ask her, very nicely, to be quiet. Something huge explodes into the back of their little car.…