David Berman

XCVI. He wasn’t sure how the bathroom mirror worked but decided it must be powered by the razor blades and aspirin he found in the engine compartment. It was a matter of relearning everything after he surfaced from the coma. The hospital chapel had bought a battered fog ...

Michael rowed the boat ashore and moored it to a gnarled stake. He reached into the fold of his turtleneck sweater and pulled out a map drawn on the back of a wallet-sized photograph. In a clump of cattails he found the beat-up giftbox marked “Dirt Towers,” his orders ...

Have You Ever Been to Wheeling? (Have You Ever Had That Feeling?) Houses lean into the gold and brown hills. On the FM station someone sings “there on her face, a row of teeth he’ll replace.” Ten thousand souvenirs and not a single one worth having. A group of depressed ...

I had a real problem with time during my first few weeks of guarding. I sought a way to compress it, to make the six hour shift go faster. I tried meditation but I’ve never been quite sure if I’m doing it right. It always feels like I’m just being quiet. Now I try not to ...

There were mountain huts full of smallpox strung out along the hillsides between Escatawpa and Morgan City, birds boiling up and out of freestanding chimneys under the routine advent of rainbows and chainsaws, the old sound of cheap labor rising and falling in the weather that ...

The narrator was shot by the sniper he was describing and I quickly picked up his pen. What luck, I thought, to be sitting up here in the narrator’s tower where the parking lots look like chalkboards and the characters scurry around or fall down and die as I design it. Then I ...

Orbit One—Far above my life, one trillion storeys up, above the silver judgement wheels, is a clear civilization, along the sidereal coast, a perpetual glide, where the rapid hearts sleep, where armrest factories puff, “we invite the nervous,” for warm firm handshakes ...

Five Dream Units: 1. Knock the frog 2. Kick it out 3. Push it through 4. Cranial amphibian 5. Forget the happening 6. Your head/furnace He brushed his teeth with rainwater and mowed his lawn with billy goats. He marvelled at certain sticks and tufts of moss he found in the ...