Category: Yo Ivanhoe

As a child he had been hesitant, self-conscious, and frightened of everything, all products of a certain persuasive calamity of the blood, an inbred insecurity that even the constant certainty that he was loved could not entirely vanquish. His response to this crippling insecurity was to act up, and in time, as he grew into…

Since he lost his job as an aviation mechanic in the late 1980s, Riggs has been a clerk at the International Repository of Regrets. He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in almost ten years. The Repository, housed in a World War Two-era train depot, is a vast place of bad light and spooky, institutional…

When he came up through the tunnel, the darkness had not yet lifted and the cicada were still in full damp rattle. The heat had broken in the night, and the coolness was stirring up an apparational moving fog, heavy, moist. The street lights were dropping fuzzed cones of grainy and ineffectual light straight down…

This is mine. This. This word. These words. They are mine. They belong to me. Increasingly they may be the only things I can claim with any certainty. They come from me, from the mysteries of my blood, from the contents of my brain, welded together by the sparks traveling in my nerves and up…

Please. Thank you. Preceding or preceded by a transaction with some anonymous servant of convenience, and occasionally involving as well a few other words in the form of a request. For days, sometimes weeks, little more in the way of human conversation. His voice was disppearing further down his throat by the day. He would…

Moving books around on the shelves, a quilt of my own making taking shape and standing solid against the wall. All those stories that have both saved and ruined me. This image is somewhere on those shelves: the testicles of Uranus, bobbing in a moon-shattered sea, headed for Cyprus. What a foul and wonderful story.…