No wax figure has ever seen a movie. Has ever complained about the exorbitant prices at the concession stand. Has ever eaten most of the popcorn during the previews. Their hands have never emerged from the warm paper bag, thin ribbons of melted wax joining their fingers to the buttered kernels. No wax figure has…

He spent his twenties the star of a bad novel. How strange and unworldly to age that way, his twenties like another planet. While the sun did a slow roll in those dimly lit years.  Was he a hero? He couldn’t tell. Just because everyone looked real, and there were bar scenes and wing men,…

When you fall asleep the ocean in your head is slick and glazed, but overnight fog rolls in. You wake to foghorns, problems announcing themselves in the muted dark. I’m here. I’m here. Steer clear. An article to unravel, data to enter, seventeen texts to answer. The warnings barely register. Today you will stub your…

The trucker liked labels, so he wrote “hat” on his hat, “oil” on the can in the vault, and “vault” on the vault itself. “You already know what those things are,” complained the man with his thumb stuck out. The trucker wrote “hitchhiker” on the complainer and pulled him into the cab marked “cab.” They…

The butcher was in a corner of the empty shop. The butcher was in a corner of the empty shop, and he was sitting and reading a novel. The novel the butcher was reading was about a bullied high schooler. The novel the butcher was reading was about a bullied high schooler with telekinetic abilities…

We begin here: Mae was late. Not only to this particular appointment, but in a broader sense: lateness seemed a part of her. As she rushed up the front steps, tripping on a flagstone levered upward by a tree root, she was flooded with the sensation that for years, possibly for her whole life, she…

Jessie’s been cutting corners all along, and we know this won’t fly in Hell Week. We’re in this musical, something about the 50s. Whenever we dance, she half-heartedly finds her spot. She flips her wrists and implies wind-milling her arms over her head instead of flying those arms and flexing those hands like the rest…

In all of the versions of this story there are dogs. The dogs roam in a pack – fifty, a hundred maybe – wild and unmanageable. The wooded area where the dogs roam is thick with brambles and nobody can get close enough to count. Nobody tries, either. Most of the dogs are big and…

It is like a lonely lighthouse at the mouth of some Norwegian fjord. It is like a lonely lighthouse set on a rocky island at the mouth of a Norwegian fjord that is leaning ever so slightly against an easterly gale. The leaning lighthouse is a matter of some concern to the little fjordic town…

I can approach the Soil Renewal Zone. There are viewing stations, weathered concrete platforms, along the western periphery. I can look down into a stand of trembling aspen, or a wetland scrape, or a flowering meadow grazed by cattle. I can bring my old, broken Leica and peer through the rangefinder, framing photos I’ll never…

4/4] The first time I shaved my legs I was ten and in a hotel room shower with a leg forward and my father guiding a razor downward. When none was left he looked up and said we were lucky I didn’t have any more yet. Yet. A word that after time became: not yet,…

A number of birds filled the sky. A melancholic trace of something in their song, almost bittersweet. No one else seemed to have any interest in them. Instead, their eyes skittered across the mound, searching.  It was still the hazy rose and purple of twilight. The mound took up a corner of the heavens, blotting…