My father told a story about some forensic pathologist friends of his. Why he had many forensic pathologists as friends is another story, but the reason can be inferred by people good at making educated guesses. Some of these pathologists were medical examiners. Number one. He said they were always together, like bananas. Every one […]
The house is empty. I remember coming here as a boy and I can still taste the popcorn we ate on the nights over, the nights I spent with John and Judy here. But mostly I remember Galatea. I asked her, “Why me?” I’ll leave out the erotic parts, some of the physical details. Judy […]
He caught her at the cafe and they sat for drinks For a moment they watched the clouds, a bundle of helium balloons colored with the colors of the Mexican flag, and pigeons checking the ground for food. Finally, he said, “He called me a cod. A cod.” “A reference to fish?” she said. “I […]
The woman said into the phone: “When the knife nicked me, my husband was outside picking apples. I finished dinner after containing the blood. My husband came in with the apple basket. He always washes them straight away. He went to the counter. ‘There’s blood on the counter. What happened?’ I told him I cut […]
In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Link. Of course, the tale provoked mystery and wonder in Maricela, who watched the moon. It seemed so nearby. Cruz–he’d been anxiously wondering what might […]
My friend Cruz explained a discussion he’d had with Aristotle, the whereabouts of which he located with contradictions. “Some hut somewhere,” he said. Then, as the conversation proceeded, “Yes, I looked out the window and saw the train pass the way trains do at dusk,” which, of course, put into question Cruz’s use of the […]
The fire herder asked me to look at my hands and when I did I saw a caterpillar struggling up a stone in the space where my left palm should’ve been. “What the hell?” The fire herder said, “Okay, okay. It’s an illusion only.” The caterpillar withdrew behind my thumb and index finger. I said, […]
Sometimes I wonder who that is in my basement, a form that’s obviously a visitation. A “that” not a “who.” A friend who never left the party, who decided to stay on? No. A memory of myself swimming or that old man who’d come by the house with his basket of breads, who said, “Are […]
The filmmaker saw an amazing thing. On a busy road, she saw a chipmunk jump from the edge of a yard, race across the street, and leap into a crop of lilies that had yet to open their blossoms. Normally, this road, at this time of morning, evoked the loudness of commuting. At the moment, […]
In this fiction I have a character I’ve named Jed, who you can imagine is tall, wears a cowboy hat and red cowboy boots, which have been roughed by age and wet weather. Jed has a habit of asking people what “something” was like. He’d ask, “What was it like to sky dive?” “What was […]
I remember being in Osaka in Honchu many years ago. We were standing at a street corner. A small man approached us with a square of photographic paper. He showed it to us. The man said it was a photograph of his father, who had been lost in the heated vapors of August 9th. He […]
It is true that the great filmmaker Jen-Luc Godard said that “cinema is life.” The metaphor remains a mystery as it has been agreed for many centuries that works of art are not life but a mimicry or representation. Some critics argue that Godard’s films are self-reflexive. They are his life broken open and he […]
Years ago, I found an important photograph of my father, a film maker who said his own father had been born and raised in the Netherlands. Or was it Belgium? The photograph had been taken before the war. We know this because of the condition of the paper, which, perhaps, had been chewed around the […]
When I fell in love, I felt an immense weight rise from my shoulders. I told my then to be wife this. I told her, “When I fell in love with you I suddenly knew how to breathe and that all my time up to that moment I fell in love I had been suffocating. […]
It is assumed that the last stitch in a rug somehow touches the first stitch as the final word in a sentence or poetic line reaches back into reading time and provokes meaning. In film, the last image recalls the first. In my room, for example, I have a leather pouch filled with coins: six, […]
