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 →
Oak pollen and filtered sunshine. That’s the smell wafting in through open windows as I loll on the couch slack-jawed, chain-reading library books with one hand and licking Tootsie Roll Pops with the other. It’s the summer between second and third grade; beautiful June day in my house in the middle of the Wisconsin woods, 75 degrees, all alone, parents… Read more →
I collected shiny stickers, fuzzy stickers, stickers that smelled like cherries. Sheets of unicorns and teddy bears. Circles of hearts and rainbows. I revered Lisa Frank and her psychedelic penguins and tigers frolicking together. Always frolicking. Dad hurled a lamp at the wall, cockroaches skittered, and my mother cowered under her own melancholy-bent antennae. I flipped from one page to… Read more →
I find the photo among his family’s old things: brass animal figurines (gazelle, birds, a deer), a tearing-at-the-stitching limp frog hand puppet, wedding china never used. In the photo, there is a boy, no more than eight or nine. He is holding something up. I can’t tell what it is. All angles. A piece of glass maybe? The photo is… Read more →
Honorable Mention -1000 Below: Flash Prose and Poetry Contest Judged by Michael Martone Last night I heard the screaming, loud voices behind the wall. Another sleepless night for me. It won’t do no good to call. The police always come late if they come at all and when they arrive they say they can’t interfere with domestic affairs between… Read more →
Honorable Mention -1000 Below: Flash Prose and Poetry Contest Judged by Michael Martone Mike and I slept over at Grandma’s house for the weekend while Dad wrote papers for college and Mom typed them. We lay under the covers listening to the racket in the kitchen as Grandma baked racks of tall bread and long pans of thick, cheesey focaccia…. Read more →
2nd Place -1000 Below: Flash Prose and Poetry Contest Judged by Michael Martone The castle wall rose into the sky, a stone facade in ruins whose windows showed an interior of blue air and clouds. The rooms of the old Schloss had crumbled away. The harsh rains that blow through Germany from the Atlantic had given way, on that summer… Read more →