Colorblind

"She only painted women deshabille: A waitress from a café on Rue Madelaine who complained of disrobing in the cold, a dancer from McHattie’s who smoked thin brown cheroots, held impossible poses, feral stares."

Read my little story Colorblind in the August Blue Five Notebook. 

Painting: Julius Rolshoven, 'Nude Reading A Sketchbook', oil, c. 1900.

You Could See The Light From Farther Then

My little story You Could See The Light From Farther Then is included in the December issue of A-Minor Magazine. My thanks to editors Nicolette Wong and Eryk Wenziak.

Charm Of A Ratdog

On the way out of town I pulled into the rundown Phillips at the top of the hill and filled the tank and bought a shrinkwrapped hoagie. The chocolate chip cookies in the case looked good but when the clerk dropped one in a bag it rang like a stone. I said you got coffee? He shrugged. He was a skinny kid with the charm of a ratdog and weak whiteboy dreads. Wide strips of pale scalp stretched tight and painful looking. I said can you nod? His eyes got smaller. What? I said nevermind. The pot was a third full. It smelled like last week’s but it’d do to dunk the cookie. I said you got napkins? He was reading the Times. He didn’t look up. Under the hotdogs. I took more than I needed. You never have too many. He’d been reading the help wanteds. He said you got thirty? I said yeah. He made change. It wasn’t much. I shouldered the door open holding my coffee so it wouldn’t spill and went out. A semi blew by, jake brake bellowing. Gearing down late for the hill.

Torn-Out Pages

We had a place on Erie Avenue, two rooms full of records, mixtapes, books. Dominique’s baby grand she’d found at a house sale, the Martin flattop I played on No True Names. I kept it under my bed in a hardcase.  You don’t take a guitar like that on the road.  We were out that summer with Concrete Blonde, we'd just played South by Southwest when my cousin called, said Dee’s piano was down on the sidewalk. Our stuff piled around it, people taking what they wanted. No eviction notice, nothing.  Or maybe there was and it just got by us. A lotta shit got by us, those years.  He called friends, found a truck, but by the time they got there anything we cared about was gone. You've just played the biggest show of your life, you come offstage, and somebody says uh, listen. I hate to tell you this, but… 

Dee said for her the worst part was her notebooks. She always kept one with her, she was always writing‒ She told Rolling Stone writing through shit was how she dealt with life.  She had 'em back to junior high, all her journals, poems, songs, sketches‒ I remember one notebook, it was all just titles.  Somebody’s got ‘em‒ You can still go on eBay, find torn-out pages: Her sketches for the No True Names cover, her See-Through Smile lyrics.  You know she wrote that when she was fifteen?  You believe that? 

I got an email from a girl who said she saw us nine times that summer, we stayed at her house once.  She's a lawyer now.  She wants to go after 'em, whoever's sellin' off Dee's notebooks.  I said nah.  Dee's gone, she doesn't care.  She asked if I remembered her.  The lawyer, I mean.  I said sure. 

New Year's Day

Much respect to Otoliths editor Mark Young for continuing to demonstrate how to publish a great journal, and how much can be achieved on a free platform like Blogger. Thanks, Mark, for including my little piece 'New Year's Day' in the new issue- and for making it better, as well.

The Umbrella of the Future

Sarah finds the clicker, turns on the TV, sips her tea, waits.  Cold mornings lately, the little Sony seems sluggish, slow to wake.  Sarah hopes it’s not dying, hopes this is just a winter thing.  Imagines a small black animal, old, squarish, sedentary.  Dreaming colorful TV dreams, waking reluctantly, shivering a little.  Regaining its capacity for speech first: “Next- Is this the umbrella of the future?” someone at the Weather Channel says.  By the time the screen has brightened, picture wholly coalesced, they’ve gone to a commercial.  

(First published in Ink Sweat and Tears, 2007.)

Deliverance

My tiny story 'Deliverance' is included in the April issue of Fat City Review.

Lean On Me

Some aspiring street artist had bombed a splashy nurse with a horse hypo on Mother Mary’s door.  I pushed the button, leaned on the railing.  There was little resemblance.  The signature was elaborate.  I couldn’t read it.  The door opened a few inches.  A thick graying shirtless black man said what do you need. 

I said probably stitches.  I took a header. 

He said show me. 

I took Suzy’s hat off. 

You fucked up? 

I said no.  Just a little dizzy. 

She know you? 

I said yeah.  Mickey Houghton. 

He nodded noncommittally.  Wait out here.

Rain dripped from a leaking seam in the awning, a corroded lightfixture.  Its brightness hurt my eyes.  Looking down made me dizzier.  I held onto the railing.  A cat squeezed under the tall narrow gate between the houses, hurried down the alley.  A dog barked.  The door opened.  She was barefoot in a blue robe.  Her face shiny.  Older.  She’d got bifocals.   
 
I said sorry I got you outta bed. 

What I live for.  What’s goin’ on. 

I let go the railing with one hand, worked at Dave’s bandana.  I was told I might need stitches. 

Leave it.  By who. 

Lady gimme a ride.   

Behind her the man said he come drivin’ that blue shitbox.  I saw him get out.  Wasn’t anybody with him. 

I said the ride was before.  Long story.

Always is.  I’ll see him.  She turned away.

He said you carryin’ a needle, tell me now.  I get stuck, your head’ll be the least of it. 

I said no needles.  I’m just a pothead. 

He said yeah you look it.  You make it?  Wait.  Here.  Lean on me. 

Mystery

                                                                                  photo: Maciej Sokolowski

In a corner of a neighbor’s land too stony to till Cob makes a mystery. The small pines are budding, and today he brings an armload of stakes, pocketfuls of baling twine, soft rags to keep the bound seedlings from wind-chafing. For a moment Cob imagines a far-off summer day, a child smiling, wondering. With his good stone he sharpens his shears to a bright new edge, begins pruning.

Stratissimo

It was a grand sendoff, the last Wrong Turn show, the night Randy left to join Megadeth. Word was out he’d got the call and Myhalyk’s was packed, they’d stopped letting people in. Halfway through Little Wing a bouncer cleared a path for a darkhaired girl in a long leather coat unbuttoned and trailing a belt. Somehow nobody stepped on it. She was unapologetic and intent and her Nikon was worth more than my car. Down front the bouncer put her on his shoulders and she started shooting Randy. Her flash fired the houselights, made the lightshow arrhythmic. I wondered who she was.

Google Randy, Myhalyk’s, you’ll find a cellphone video. Milling darkness, a boy’s voice: Fuck I dropped it. Train yells annnd now, lights come up, it’s all Randy. His night, his solo, and he puts on a clinic: Blinding sweep-picking, sweet fluid phrasing, squealing harmonics, screaming bends. Unstrapping, laying his guitar on the stage for the tapped piece he called Stratissimo: Randy on all fours, attacking his scarred Strat like a Steinway baby grand. Down front, a girl on someone’s shoulders, hunched over a camera. Lights flash. Flash. Flash.

Bron-yr-Aur

Happy to have my little story 'Bron-yr-Aur' in Metazen today. 

Brushstrokes

That night I dreamt of Grace.  We picked blueberries, filled a rusty paintcan.  She was quiet but she laughed for me.  Some part of me knew she shouldn’t be there and I asked how long she could stay.  She said it’s you who can’t stay.  You’ve people need you.  I said nobody needs me.  I miss you, Gracie.  She said I know.  I’m here.  I said no you’re not.  She looked away.  I said I’m sorry.  She smiled a little.  For what? 

On the way back we came to a stone wall.  I said I don’t remember this.  She said you came the other way.  Remember?  I said what?  She’d climbed over easily.  She said it’s gonna rain.  I looked back.  The sky was a big Steven Sadler painting I’d seen in Smythe Gallery once.  Greens and grays and darks massing and foreboding.  A small figure looking back from one edge.  There was no wall.  I couldn’t find Grace.  I bent close, called her name.  She didn’t answer.  I’d dropped the paintcan.  The berries had spilled.  I knelt, picked at brushstrokes.  A thorn pricked my finger.  Somewhere a phone was ringing.  It was mine.  

Liar

Happy to have a little story, Liar, in Camroc Press Review today. My thanks to CPR editor Barry Basden.

Updated Bio

'Mark Reep is a faded Polaroid taped to the only unbroken window of an abanoned house in Ithaca, New York.  Mark affects unconcern with protocols, and was last seen wearing a T-shirt that said FUCK PLANNING.  His current whereabouts are unknown.'

Merciful Dark

A truck had just pulled out from the well and I followed it up through the woods past the merciful dark of Augie’s house.  I hadn’t been farther up Barlow Hill since the year I quit 84 Lumber.  You learn the back roads driving a delivery truck.  Then you forget.  Dark and raining doesn’t help.  The road climbed steadily.  One-sided trees leaned in.  Ahead brakelights flashed and bobbed like the truck had run over something.  I slowed. Runoff had strewn stones, debris across the road.  I geared down, eased over.  When I looked up the truck was gone.  

At the top of the hill the woods ended.  Wide rolling fields fell away into night.  Ahead a tall hedgerow, buckets hung from sugar maples.  A Bobcat loader, stacks of blocky shapes defining as pallets of fieldstone wrapped in chickenwire.  Remains of a wall older than the trees, picked for three hundred dollars a ton.  The stones didn’t care.  Why should I.    

Caitlin's Boots

Happy to have a small story, 'Caitlin's Boots', in the May issue of Word Riot. As always, my thanks to editor Jackie Corley, and fiction editor Kevin O'Cuinn.

River Road

The last time I saw Augie in town he’d sold a painting and he was celebrating with the girl who’d modeled for it. She was a grad student at Chaney and she didn’t have much to say to me so I said how’d he get you naked?  She shrugged.  He asked.  It won’t work for you.  A week later I was clearing a storm drain on Howe Plaza and she walked by.  I said hey.  She kept walking.  Her friend said what was that.  

Tremont’s Chaney’s town.  It’s relentlessly gentrified, determinedly artsy and enlightened.  But pedal your Trek out the River Road on a rainy day and the ivy withers quick.  NO FRACK signs thin out and when you look up you’re in Northern Appalachia:  Failing dairy farms, new wellpads.  TOPSOIL.  FIREWOOD.

Waiting at the railroad crossing for a long line of graffitied tankcars I wondered what looked different.  One new wiper slapped the windshield post.  When the last car passed I saw the slumping barn that had stood across the tracks was gone.  They’d leveled the site, already leased the space: A row of watertrucks was parked there.  Where the new ground fell away raw and chaotic a corner of the milkhouse stuck out like a whitewashed outcropping from shredded asphalt, broken sidewalk slabs.  CLEAN FILL WANTED.  The crossing arm went up.  I went on. 

Mystery

In a corner of a neighbor's land too stony to till Cob makes a mystery. The small pines are budding, and today he brings an armload of stakes, pocketfuls of baling twine, soft rags to keep the bound seedlings from wind-chafing. For a moment, Cob sees clearly a far-off summer day, a child smiling, wondering. With his good stone he sharpens his shears to a fine bright edge, begins pruning.

A Woman Walks Into A Bar

My story A Woman Walks Into A Bar is up at The Camel Saloon. My thanks to editor and barkeep Russell Streur.

Operating Costs

My flash Operating Costs is included in Criminal Class Review 4.1. More on the issue here.