Brad Zellar

I have no one to blame but myself, I know that. I clearly blew what might have been a career-making opportunity. I’ve been trying all night to take the advice of my boss and look at this whole unfortunate situation as a ‘coachable moment,’ but it’s not easy, and, frankly, it really does make me … Read more

Odd shard, the moon. Last call. He lugs his iron head through the brass-clanging days. The dull trash-can gong of winter, a throbbing that starts in his fillings and swells clear up straining against the black cap of his underskull. Snow swept, dead silence, dead Saturday folding into Sunday morning. What is fog and what … Read more

This one guy, every couple weeks it’s these amazing places you can’t even believe, mountains and him standing in water or strung up on a cliff and hanging from ropes. He’ll bring in ten or twenty rolls of film at a time, and it’s gotten so that I look forward to seeing him come through … Read more

Long, long ago, in the sweltering twilight of an August night roaring with cicadas and the vacuum hum of a lazy small town in retreat from the heat and the falling darkness, the yards and sidewalks abandoned for living rooms and television sets (the wobbling blue screens of which we could see through the dark, … Read more

I have two options when, as now, the Muse deserts me (and this has so often been the case of late, and over, say, the last dozen years). Well, actually, I suppose I do have more than two options. I could recognize, for instance, that anyone who uses the phrase “the Muse deserts me,” or … Read more

There are surfaces you can’t get a look under. You see just a flat line, for instance, or a face, or the horizon, but that doesn’t mean there’s not something beneath or beyond them. It never means that. There’s something behind or under everything, depths and layers and distance, and it’s a rare thing that’s … Read more

1) This, Vesithia LaRue said, is not living. Decidedly. Not. Living. Ms. LaRue was in the bar of a Chinese restaurant, where she was sitting straight as a pin at a corner table and bathed in an almost infernal red light. Though she was a non-smoker, she had the mannerisms and dramatic demeanor of someone … Read more

There will come a day, mark my words, when every conceivable disappointment will meet in a giant hangar somewhere in Kansas. Every dashed dream and broken heart from all over America will converge there on the edge of some dusty little town to awkwardly mingle and avoid eye contact. Just as in Vegas, in the … Read more

I live my life in shrinking orbits, which move inward from the things of the world. Perhaps I can never fully silence my heart, but that will be my attempt. I am shadow boxing with God, around and around this small, dark room, and I have been plodding in circles for a thousand years. And … Read more