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Brother
Let’s call him Brother. He walked into one of the cash-only coffee shops on Valencia Street, which was crowded with white folk, mostly writers or aspiring ones, I could tell from the thick, unbreathable air of seriousness, I mean self-importance (to which I contributed my own ...

The Festival of Sadness
December 05, 2016
It was a chilly afternoon but we had come out anyway, wearing hats and jackets to prepare our float for the Festival of Sadness, when one of us, and I think it was Nickerson, spoke up. “I know it’s a little late for this,” he said, “and I know that ...

Dazzle Speaks with the Dead
September 05, 2016
Dazzle was neither a mystical nor a metaphysical sort of dog. He didn’t believe in karma, redemption, the transcendental ego, or the immanence of Platonic forms. For Dazzle, the world was a meaningless and immutable mess—and the byproduct of entirely material ...

Spring
Once last spring, shortly before lunch and setting off for town, I stood halfway up the mountain where one enjoys a beautiful view of the country. The damp earth was fragrant with spring; I had just stepped out of the fir forest and I now stood unmoving next to a shrub or bush ...

Remember This
Remember how you rejoiced at the sweet, fresh green spring, how enchanted you were by the silver-white, sky-blue lake, how you greeted the mountains, how you found everything beautiful that encountered you and you encountered, how you were enfolded by a splendidly vast, ...

Drums of Zaragoza
We practiced in the attic of her father’s orthodontic surgery. Stacked neatly against the back wall were hundreds of small white boxes each containing chalky casts of patients’ teeth. Orthodontistry is a good source for band names. We settled on Acid Etch, the process by ...

The Precious One
Yes, this delicate one led a precious existence. I don’t doubt this for a moment because I understand him, and this being the case, my pen hardly dares to describe or, let’s say, sketch the one who was sitting in a room, reading and trying his best to believe himself happy. ...

People Are Streinz
Seven months without a single dream. Seven whole months. The twenty-first of May was the last time I had a dream. I remember because it was also the last time it rained around here. And I remember because it was Lena’s name day and I said it was a good sign that it rained and ...

The Locked Room
Takashi dressed in long black rags, ripped fishnet stockings, and big black boots with long loose laces that splatted at the floor when he walked. He smelled strongly of old sweat and cigarette smoke, and his face was scabbed from tearing his pimples open and squeezing the pus ...

The Sunstroke
What is a vacation by the sea, if not a return to eternal youth? Every summer, land-locked Muscovites flock to the Black Sea to face rowdy crowds, suspect food, infernal partying and drinking, horrible beach music—all for the sake of a dazzling day in the water followed by an ...

From “All the Houses”
November 03, 2015
Often when I tell people I grew up in Washington, D.C., they ask me if I grew up in the city proper or in the suburbs. “In the city,” I tell them, though I’ve felt funny saying it. “But it was like a suburb,” I’ve sometimes added, because I grew up in Cleveland Park, ...

The Third Son
In a regional town, an old woman died. Her husband, a retired factory worker of seventy, walked to the telegraph office and sent six identical telegrams to remote places: “Mother died come home father.” He watched with reddened eyes as the aged telegraph worker counted the ...