Brad Zellar

What then is required? Light! Light! Light in floods! –Victor Hugo, Les Miserables “Hold that thought,” he said, and disappeared into the dark part of the house. The dark part of the house was pretty much the whole house. He had a couple of kerosene lanterns in the living room, but otherwise he was living … Read more

I have a lot of time on my hands, and I recently discovered a new trick with (I like to imagine) some radical implications. I’ve always wanted to be either a saint or at the very least some kind of hero, but the older I get the more it looks like I just don’t have … Read more

Again and again we put our sweet ghosts on small paper boats and sailed them back into their death, each moving slowly into the dark, disappearing as our hearts visited and savored, hurt and yearned. —Jack Gilbert, from “Kunstkammer” There are other things besides monkeying around with words that are necessary, require commitment and discipline … Read more

A phone call late Halloween night can reduce your head to nothing but a fat band of static, all desire creeping slowly down your body and leaking out the bottoms of your feet. This crippled world keeps pushing us further and further into our hiding places. How much more can fall off this planet before … Read more

Soon enough he’d find himself behind the wheel of a parked car again, the location as inexplicable to him as it was irrelevant, the sound of gravel still rolling in his ears. A dark little patch of the world, the moon something he was vaguely aware of, a far away place where he wished he … Read more

If dogs could stand as small as humans, and on their hind legs, upright in a manner of speaking, and if they could negotiate the complexities of a phone booth and had change, or pockets for change, and if you could still find a functioning phone booth in this godforsaken city, I’d wish a lost … Read more

From the moment she was finished, shoved in a box, and buried under a shower of styrofoam peanuts, Bertie Rathbun understood that through some accident of God she had been given a soul. As she had been dangled in the air at the inspection station, and as her strings were jerked each in turn, jiggling … Read more

Many years ago, shortly after my arrival here, I discovered a hill in the middle of the city. This hill had long been a sanctuary of teen lust, the rocks and trees painted and carved with the arithmetic of young love. An old man who’d allegedly traveled the world would ride his bicycle each day … Read more

You can’t just plop your heart on the table every day, prod it with a fork, and expect it to give up its secrets. It can’t be shoved or bullied, and has never stood for interrogations. It speaks when it’s good and ready, and when it has something to say. There’s no small talk in … Read more