Cast of Characters: Caine: A man in his middle 30’s. Arlo: A man in his early 30’s. Bartender: A man in his late 50’s. Scene Neighborhood bar located in Western North Carolina. Time Fall. […]
Fiction Archive
Man of the House
This is waiting at the window; this is the empty dirt road that weaves like a serpent through the verdant earth; this is the aroma of soda bread baking and the sound of the wireless […]
Dressed in White
Growing up, my parents never really took us anywhere. Everything normal families made a fuss about, like graduations and birthdays, we spent at home. Their excuse was always how tired they were. I hated that […]
Somewhere in America, 2016
Without the excuse of profiling, never in fear of mandatory minimums or shots in the back, The Absent Father, full of pride, and suffering, the kind of illness we see too often, in our siblings […]
Soldier and Knight
Smoke billowed and the city burned. The fire bit into the grey. Child-like embers danced in the darkened sky because the glutton named War had eaten all day. Bombs flashed, revealing Death in the […]
Forbidden
Shhh. Do you know what it’s like not to be able to open your mouth? Not to be allowed to speak the truth? Up to the point that it’s stuck inside of you, eating you […]
Bushwick: Parte Dos.
Click here for Part I of this story, Bushwick: Parte Una. Mom stopped halfway through the block and reversed the car back to the steps of the basement. I had to hold myself back from […]
Our World and Welcome To It
Smokey room. Little room off Rue Polonceau. New old country, France and the lights are so bright and I hate them. Do they know what it is like to see your mother in a mud […]
Bushwick: Parte Una.
Mom said, “Fuck this,” as she handed me clothing soaked in feces, mold or whatever was in that floodwater. I wanted to ask her for the quarter to put in our curse jar, kept on […]
NYC Musician
The pavement was wet from the early morning showers and the trees in Union Square dripped on the benches and bright green tables on the lawn. The trees dripped on people walking across the square. […]
Cheque
Cheque placed his dress shoes on the kitchen floor, and reached under the kitchen table for his shoe shining kit. In a small handwoven basket, traditionally used for keeping tortillas warm, he found a tired […]
IDOLS
I’ve never snorted rat poison before but I was glad that I could cross that from my list of things I shouldn’t have done. That feeling of being so close to death brought me […]
Many Dead, And A Funeral
He grew up in this house with plastic covers on the chairs, and the decrepit couch with stuffing escaping the leather. This is my second time here. I should be uncomfortable sitting here. I […]
One of Two
At two years old, Annabelle fell into a pool. Just dropped in and floated down through the water like an egg dropped through soup all the way to the bottom where she settled. She didn’t swim […]
Oasis
It was all they could do to bear the time of the drought. Long, dusty and cracked, every day was dryer than the last. The weeks stretched beyond recognition. Tumble weeds moseyed into the […]
A Simple Survey
When there’s a knock on the door it’s hard not to answer it. Leaving a possibility open always gnaws at the back of my consciousness…
Grrrl in the Ballet Flats
1. The girl with scratched pink ballet flats sat carefully counting her change. Piled on her lap: nickel, quarter, penny, dollar at a time, disappeared into the pocket of a black jacket. Leather, maybe. Her […]
Smoothies with Granma
On Saturdays in June, Violet would take her Granma for fruit smoothies. She would find her Granma among the other patients, sit her in a wheelchair, sign her out for the hour and wheel her […]
Road Trip to Hades
At 3:20 a.m., I was dressed and standing in front of the mirror in my bedroom. My bedroom was not large, about fifteen feet by ten, with a window facing west, and several posters on the wall. There was one of Don Mattingly, the Yankees’ first baseman, his glove on the ground waiting to stop any baseball from getting by. Another was of Debbie Gibson, in concert, as well as a poster of a topless Samantha Fox. I stared back at the mirror and smiled. Today was supposed to be the beginning of something special; today was the beginning of my mother and I reconnecting.
My mother and I used to be really close. We could talk about anything. We would stay up late watching television and drink hot chocolate with marshmallows. This changed, however, when I was fourteen years old and she decided to come out of the closet by having her lover tell me that she was gay.
My mother walked into my room and seemed to be in a good mood. “I didn’t think you would be awake,” she said, fixing my collar.
“What? Shit, mom, I’m not gonna miss this trip for nothin’,” I said.
“Good, I’m gonna have a cup of coffee, want some?”
I nodded and she left the room.
We had grown apart. Arguments and disrespect dominated the airways of our tiny home. After my mother came out, Isabel, her lover, moved in with her “entourage” of four kids cramming eight people into our two-bedroom apartment.
We exited the building and were greeted by the cold winter morning air. The wind was blowing fiercely, and I loved it. The streets were filled with mountains of dirty snow, and the pavement had that white coating left behind by the snowplows. My mother had borrowed her best friend’s car: a blue 1983 Chevy Nova. It was three years old with light-blue cloth seats and the Puerto Rican flag hanging from the rear view mirror. It was very clean, smelled like cinnamon, and it had a cassette player.
We were on our way to Buffalo to visit a lady, a lady my mother was playing dirty with behind Isabel’s back. The lady was named Jennifer, and my mother had met her in a gay club called Aries, in the Bronx. Jennifer, a court stenographer, had been in New York City visiting her friends for the weekend. They hit it off, and the affair soon followed. My mother’s philandering never surprised me. It would not have been the first time she strayed. My mother was also having an affair with a lady that lived on the fourth floor of our building. All this despite being in an “exclusive” relationship with Isabel. My mother sat in the driver’s seat, placed the key in the ignition and turned it on. The inside was freezing, and she quickly turned on the heater.
Thrill Ride
Twenty-three years had passed since I spent a summer in my hometown of Gorleston-On-Sea, a quaint, soporific seaside town on the bucolic Norfolk coast in southeast England. My last summer there was on the eve of my nineteenth birthday. I was about to move to London to attend university and finally snip the apron strings that tied me to my comfortable, rural middle class upbringing. Now, as a parent with two young daughters of my own, I felt they should experience what I had taken for granted in my youth. I wanted them to trade the muggy, congested, dusty streets of New York for the tranquil, salty air and rolling green cliffs of England. Any other parent who had the chance would do the same.
So under a cloudless blue sky and gentle breeze, a few days into my trip, I went on one of my customary morning runs on the expansive golden beach, which was about a thousand yards from my mom’s house. About halfway through, as the endorphins kicked in, soaked in sun and sweat, I felt a beautiful, spacey high. The blur of thirty years vanished, and I couldn’t distinguish the timeline between being eleven and forty-one. It didn’t really matter. The surrounding smells and feelings were so familiar. I completed the run quickly, hardly noticing my feet moving on the sand.