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Goodnight Baby
September 06, 2021
Chase loved his bandmates like brothers. Riley, floppy-haired and gangly, manned the fake instruments—melodica and glockenspiel, donkey jaw and rattle—free-playing like a kid in music class. Matt, compact and forever frowning, kept a factory-correct drumbeat, the seatbelt ...

Indescribable Colors
On the palm-sized screen it looks curiously real, like something he’s already seen. She slouches in the drugstore aisle, clawing the skin on the back of her hands, sunglasses black and gleaming in the halogen daylight. This is the girl: a bored blonde, her head at once too big ...

Magus of the Ariegé
Let’s call him the Magus. He never called himself that but his followers did behind his back, the ones who hung on every word in his Amsterdam glory days. He was, in the years before the last century turned, the toast of the local underground, the man who led hundreds on ...

In This World You Have to Sell Something
March 26, 2021
Sister Helene swings her baseball bat across Richard’s dresser and shards of decorative junk fly everywhere in the vast bedroom. Richard, the homeowner, Sister Helene, Nick the camera guy, and I are all wearing face shields for this very reason. There is violent ecstasy on ...

Town of Stairs
The town of stairs was built around a square at the bottom of a deep canyon. The town of stairs kept people in little pods, which branched off from the square, at the top of the canyon. Everyone lived alone in their little pods, and walking up someone else’s staircase was a ...