Blur: figment of my imagination, a ghost of her, the imprint in my mind. Her face there, vivid, the second the scalding water hit my shoulders. Her face then, thirty-some years ago, since that’s how I see her even now—young but vaguely angry, her lips a halo of wrinkles, like the jagged rays I drew around yellow circles to show… Read more →
My freshman homecoming date rumbles away in his dad’s Ford pickup with his older brother—dressed in a clown suit—at the wheel. I huff the sweet exhaust and watch their red taillights burn out of sight. I take it slow up the front steps to the house, wondering how I’ll make it past Mom without her seeing that my dress is… Read more →
Teaching can be a thankless job. I have done it for thirty years and sometimes it feels like it’s getting more thankless all the time. I teach freshman comp at a local college. Last semester was one of the worst. A student who wrote one paper out of five and missed the last month and a half of class claimed… Read more →
My damp legs make a gross thwapping noise every time I peel one from the chair, but the ripped vinyl itches too much for me to keep still. The windowless American Legion kitchen where Mom works nights as a short-order cook is blazing hot. “Indian Summer” my teacher called it. Mom is in a mood on account of the thick… Read more →
These are the facts we know: George died in 1883, a successful man. Three years later, my great-great-grandfather Joseph, who had followed his brother from Ohio to Kansas to Denver, abandoned his wife and children and lit out for California. It was where George had gone at the end, seeking treatment for a kidney infection no one in the 19th… Read more →
After your ex became your stalker, you moved from Northern California to a 2-bedroom apartment eighty miles southeast of Los Angeles where you looked out the front window while drinking coffee and watched one of the meth addicts who slept in the nearby river bank walk along the street commuters travelled to get to the freeway. Seeking safety and a… Read more →
There are zombies, or enemy fighters, or aliens coming at you and you’ve been here before. You know precisely which way their blood will pool, the red spreading in a crenellation of ones and zeros. There is no doubt whether this universe is deterministic; it is, in fact, determined, each zombie springing up precisely where he did before, eyeball lolling… Read more →
“You dazzle me,” my father Lee wrote to Flossi Banks in late 1945. “Whenever I look into your green-flecked eyes—mmm, there I go again.” Such passion, such openness. This man was unrecognizable. “Should I close this with…’my heart beats like an a-bomb?’” In response there were a few distant letters from Flossi, the Ivy League lady who raised me and… Read more →
“My son, my only child, turned out to be a nobody,” Zina Banks reveals. “He’s out in California, and he’s 33 years old, trying to be a rapper, which I’ve told him ever since he was 15, that ‘you don’t have it!’ Rapping about all these bitches and witches… you know. I said, ‘If you’re going to rap, rap about… Read more →
“One Diet Pepsi, please,” I say to the woman in a blue polo shirt spotted with pizza grease. She swipes at a bead of sweat at the fringe of her hairnet. “That’ll be 63 cents.” I come to Costco on Fridays at 2, just after I teach a senior seminar on popular culture criticism. This would be a great place… Read more →