• THE LAST TIME

    The last time we spoke you asked me when the end was coming. I didn’t have a good answer for you, wasn’t even quite sure what you meant by the question, the end of what? Of time, of your life or mine, or merely the end of a conversation we had been carrying on for…


  • REFLECTIONS

    You believe this is how, and where, it begins, but that is only your conception of it. You believe the mirror shows your face each morning, but it is merely polished glass, and you mind sees what it perceives to be you in the glass, while the glass is empty. It has no real beginning,…


  • PREPARE FOR LANDING

    And then there is the abyss where it all comes crashing back down on you and there is nothing and no one, and you grasp and find only yourself at the bottom and arise, crawl up and out, and nothing has changed except the face of one who saw you fall. You say words meant…


  • WASH IN

    The morning paper said that a surprising number of Portuguese man o’ war washed up on the beach yesterday, bringing out the Dangerous Marine Life flags. The paper also featured stories on two fatal hit and runs, a person killed in an apparent drug deal gone bad and the opening of a redone highway exit…


  • THOSE WHO CAN’T DO (OR TEACH)

    “You know,” she said, “it is the critics, they are the real problem, all holy and self-proclaimed arbiters of taste, deciding what is and is not art, as if God spoke late one night and declared to each one that he or she and only he or she would determine what is art.” I wanted…


  • BSOD U SOB

    The screen, a shade of blue you have come to hate, stares back at you defiantly. You expected something like this, though there is never good reason for it. You check your calendar and clear the next two days of all non-critical items. You adjust the chair carefully, for it will be your home for…


  • MORNING

    Each morning she looks at the small window in her bedroom, just after the sun has broken the horizon and the lake is set ablaze. Each morning she sees the small boat, its oars resting on the gunwale, dark against the orange water. She never asks how the boat got there, why it stays there,…


  • MESSAGE RECEIVED

    There was nothing he liked more than wandering along the shore early in the morning, before the rakes and people arrived, just to see what the night had washed in on the now departed high tide. There would be shells of course, but rarely one he didn’t have already in profusion, and the occasional jellyfish…


  • MIA

    Each morning, as he went out on his walk, he would check the street light pole just down his block. He would carefully read the missing cat and dog posters, pause to think whether he might have seen any of the missing animals. He often wondered how many had been found, the missing notices left…


  • TMI

    He lived in a world of acronyms. He hated them. He knew they were ubiquitous and becoming more so. Modern discourse, some said, couldn’t happen without them, since modern discourse didn’t involve people speaking words, but devices interacting. Though how a PDA could be LMAO was beyond him. Still he knew all about FIFO and…