When Buddy Clister came up the hill that afternoon he wasn’t his usual shrill, braying self. This was a guy who’d once had a fistfight with Eddie Guster’s mother, and Mrs. Guster had kicked Buddy’s ass and bloodied his nose. You’d think that would be a pretty tough thing for an aspiring two-bit punk to … Read more
A man finds himself stranded halfway across a bridge that he suddenly realizes is taking him nowhere. He pauses for a moment in the darkness to catch his breath and notices, for the first time, a river rolling along far below him. The river is alive. It is moving, going unimaginable places, traveling ultimately to … Read more
How long, I wonder, was the world’s longest suicide note? And, however long it was, do you suppose it was long enough? It was January, a Friday night just like this one. It got dark early, and it got so dark. The darkness didn’t even fall; it just seemed to spend half the day creeping … Read more
Dead, the slender bug astonished with its complexity of sprung parts and the volume of its viscosity, the evidence of a supreme and comically-mad engineer’s attention to detail. One of God’s little basement projects. The poor little dude. What did this skittering mystery hope to find on the other side of the room? Perhaps the … Read more
He’d sit up in the darkness staring across the inlet at the lighthouse on its pile of rocks, tossing its feeble light out into the fog rolling in off the lake. It was a ridiculous and hokey metaphor for exactly where he was in his life, but, what the hell, it was oddly comforting. The … Read more
Ruckert lived across a pasture from an order of monks who were famous for their gingerbread, their honey, and their singing. They’d supposedly sung at the White House once upon a time, and had made a few records. The had an orchard out behind the monastery, where they kept their bees, and Ruckert often saw … Read more
I’m trying to crawl back into baseball, which essentially means crawling from the wreckage of last season, when various nagging injuries cut the year short for me and led to disappointment and then flat-out indifference. I’ve never in my years as a fan had a season like 2005, and I’m hoping that it was nothing … Read more
There was a time, believe me or don’t, when machines didn’t have memories. They opened cans, maybe, or suctioned dirt from carpets, and that was plenty wonderful. We were happy as fucking clams when we no longer had to trudge out to a shed in the backyard to relieve ourselves. And put this in your … Read more
–Illustration by James Dankert Here’s a new wrinkle in the gray, clanging days before Christmas: Uncle Jumbo has been playing miserable pet store Santa Claus, wrestling squirming cats and dogs and even the occasional bird or lizard in my lap while a wrinkled and alcoholic little temp-pool elf tries to snap photos for somebody’s sad … Read more