There was banter at the dinner table. People laughed at somebody’s jest. These boisterous gestures of joy distracted me. There were at least twenty people seated here, and the clamour of cutlery and talks rose to high-pitched peals. Then the butler entered with a tray in his beefy hands. On the tray, I saw many […]
1 Thomas was hungry. He had been hungry before, but this was different. During community college he dizzied himself with a restricted diet of instant noodles and peanut butter that did nothing but prevent the walls of his stomach from eating each other. College hunger was a rite of passage, and even a source of […]
A Wake-Up Call by Milton Ehrlich I woke up this morning with the sight and scent of bouquets of red roses assembled on my chest. My sleeping wife was gone. An indentation of her body, was all that remained in bed. I searched all the rooms in our house without ever opening a door— and […]
Coffee Shop Girl by Christopher Linforth She looks over my poem and tells me to replace slugabed with a word the common people will understand. I can’t tell her it’s part of my style—she knows I’m all surface, that I carry a DVD about a Michael Jackson impersonator in my messenger bag, that I pretend […]