Once there was a travelling girl. When she was 12 years old, her parents (in an effort to minimize inconvenience and keep expenses down) took her into the woods and left her there. They had some pangs of conscience (who wouldn’t?) but consoled themselves with the thought that she would quickly and efficiently be murdered… Read more »
I’m sitting in the back seat of my father’s turquoise Plymouth. I’ve just been expelled from school for a list of offences including (but not limited to) smoking pot, ditching classes, and vandalizing miscellaneous articles of lab equipment, textbooks, acoustic tiles, and an overhead projector. He hasn’t said a word since we’ve been driving. There… Read more »
The Empress of Love is sitting on her throne in her distant palace. The walls of the palace are made of cellophane and tinsel and paper as white as snow. The full moon (the moon is always full in this strange land) creates a pen-and-ink drawing of the heavily wooded imperial gardens. The gardens are… Read more »
An old woman sits down at a desk with a battered typewriter, the same one she has used since she was a young girl. The desk she sits at is made from the wood of coffins and the boards of a sunken ship. She sits down in front of the typewriter, and begins to record… Read more »
I was walking one day past a vacant lot beside a vacant factory on the outskirts of a vacant city. There was this big red dog staring at me from the shadows. Its hair was the colour of dried blood and crumbling brick, rusted bicycle chains and disused railway lines. It was so silent and… Read more »
So I am sitting at a window table in one of the hinterland outlet pods of the evil Starbuckian Empire. I am waiting for the caffeine molecules to clear customs at the blood-brain barrier, and help bring my shabby, wandering thoughts into focus. In the meantime, random ideas dart and flicker about my sleepy head…. Read more »
Excuse me, Sir. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, and I don’t mean to be rude. But there are some things you ought to be aware of. You should know, for example, that the brain of that moth that you never would have noticed, the one squashed on the grill of your Mercedes SUV, is… Read more »
This column originally appeared September 19, 2008, in issue 1637. One day You’re in the classroom, in the fifth grade maybe, and you spend too long staring out the window. You notice the flickering light of an approaching storm, the faces of angels or gargoyles rising and falling in a cauldron of clouds. You turn… Read more »
Because the couple had rented the house in mid-July, when the mosquitoes were clouding and clotting and droning like nature’s own hurdy-gurdy in the summer air, they never gave a passing thought to the ancient furnace sitting silent and still in the basement, or the single-paned windows throughout. By mid-December, the city was locked in… Read more »
Some of those things they kept from you a good long while. They distracted you with shining ornaments, bendable action figures, flickering screens, dolls with shiny blond hair that drive bright pink cars to the plastic mall. Some of those things they called evil, exorcised them from you with complicated rituals involving rulers and acts… Read more »