Clinical

I’m with a friend who needs medical attention. As we make our way towards the clinic I notice a small black dot near my right thumb. After staring at it for a few moments I realize the dot is a tiny spider but before I can make my move, it crawls through my thumbnail underneath…

Anamnesis

When he saw the little girl on the red bicycle making her way along the sidewalk, he tried to recall her name. She looked like his next-door neighbor’s daughter who’d had the same name as that actor from that animated movie that was being lauded by critics online. It was a unisex name…could it have…

Good Things

Mark sat on the bench – one of those seats normally blocked by the concession carts – staring at the southwest entrance of the park. It was a brisk Monday morning in the middle of February and, though it was bit too cold to be sitting still, it was unusually warm for the season and…

Mix n’ Match

Note: One or more of the characters described in the story exhibits or possesses one or more of the attributes in the list. The list is non-exhaustive – items can appear more than once or not at all. The List: Biological Woman Biological Man 26 years old 23 years old Queer Sibling A recently filled…

A Number

I decided to name the man who muttered numbers Chuck because of the navy-blue Chuck Taylors he wore every morning on the subway. Before that, and before he was the man who muttered numbers, he was just another passenger, a detached presence with whom I’d share space for a time on my morning commute. It…

Pomp and Circumstance

When Noah Travast stepped onto the platform laid out on the football field of Ellis Valley High School, it was with little surprise that he did not find his older brother among the hundreds of onlookers sitting on the steel bleachers. Noah let the bitterness well up for a moment before taking a deep breath and stepping…

Flashes

“I want to be struck by lightning.” Jane turned her head and watched the rain droplets slowly accumulate into tiny beads of water on the side of the sedan parked in the empty lot in front of the grocery store. Occasionally the beads would grow bold enough to ignore the steady drizzle of their origin…

Corporate Ennui: Or (A Forced Metaphor)

I’ve been irritable at the office lately. It might have something to do with the gloomy weather, or the increasingly loud buzzing noise in the back of my mind that relentlessly insists that maybe my responsible life choices were, in fact, not the best choices. But if we’re being honest, it probably has something to…

Ruggamuff

At the age of 23, Allen Barillo’s most important accomplishment remains the one he’d made fifteen years ago in Ms. Peterson’s classroom at George Mackey Elementary: his discovery of the ruggamuff. As part of their lesson on taxonomy, Allen and his classmates were required to conjure up their own contributions to the animal kingdom. The…