They called the child the companion. We will raise him as we would have ourselves, they agreed, but they were young, and stayed up late at night preparing the nursery and sharing their worries. What if the companion is ugly? I will grow thin and wrinkled, said the mother. I will not shave, the father […]
Our Audubon
You and I both must know that birds are the blessing disseminated. I only knew you eight years ago. But I found you again in the bookstore here. I touched your book like a mirror pureed into pages—it was the you I remember, the you of our brief friendship. I touched the corners and numbers. […]
Basement
Rarely has opportunity for public visibility limited Virgil’s sensibility, particularly in how he delivers his work to an audience in what appears to be his being in a state of seamlessness—if, or as long as he can succumb to his vision, one that finds itself most precise, underwater. Virgil’s vision remains as clear in the […]
Twelve
Take it off, take it off, said the baby with no shirt on straight up in his high blue sky chair pretty certain, off already was his sister’s shirt a little older, a lot quieter. Take it off, said their father to their mother in a different tone. It was August in the Northern Hemisphere, […]
Things James Baldwin Could Not Say to Malcolm X on National Television.
1. In America, everyone treated me like a frog-eyed piece of trash and I could not get laid, but in France, in Fra—You see this blowtorch, Malcolm?—I use this blowtorch in Paris to keep the French boys off my dick. I sorta hold it up to this can of hairspray here and make a flamethrower, […]
All the Teenaged Sarahs
THE ORDINARY WORLD The ordinary world is a Midwest suburb built in the 1980s, made of exactly three nearly identical architectural styles of houses. Everyone has wall-to-wall beige carpet and teal throw pillows and a wall unit displaying blown-glass vases and miniature ladies with beanbag bodies and ceramic heads. Sarah lives in the ordinary world. […]
How To Avoid Huge Dicks
As the father of two teenagers, I found this book invaluable. I’m sure other parents here can empathize when I say I shudder at the thought of the increasing presence of huge dicks in the lives of my children. I certainly remember the strain I caused so long ago for my own parents when I […]
When Friday is the Color Yellow
I kept reminding myself that this was my second chance, my rebirth so to speak. Only I was starting at the point where I could look after myself. I could choose what I was going to eat and could afford to buy luxury goods on the computer. There was no need to make friends, so […]
NC-17
selected for the 2018 SLS fiction award Say a man and woman, naked, sit on the floor across from each other. Light envelops the couple, outlines their profiles in gold. One can trace down the slope of the man’s right shoulder, ascend and descend the shorter hill of the woman’s bent knee, before arriving […]
Identity Theft [a transoceanic correspondence between two strangers]
Ramsey, There comes a time when even nostalgia can’t make you ache for the past. Then again, every reference to the past seems like an indictment of the subconscious realm. I try to see myself in my two young children, but the exercise is futile, and results in a sort of clumsy signaling between […]
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