There is no word for “freedom” in biology; in family idiom, no concept of the Self. Cruel monsters of my childhood still surface, lurking too close in the genetic pool. How can I stand apart? When will I be my own? In hostile mirrors I reflect my sister’s face and carry out the day’s routine …
No longer are my dreams long halls for monsters: people there these nights are faceless and benign, ready to waltz with me when threads of music knit the raveled sleeve of care. My nightmare enemies have moldered to the dust beneath my bed. In shadowed closets, they hung up their grotesqueries and departed, closing …
What if they are the true perceptions of your life, those thoughts which come at two in the morning, when shadows twist and shift like lunatics and darkness presses its cold fingertips hard against your straining eyes? What if the dull rage in the dregs of booze glazing the last ice cubes, at the …
They thought that we would go like sheep bemused and walking in our sleep, unmindful cattle herded deep down into the nightmare: the troll behind the closet door, the serpent in the dresser drawer— we walked the charcoal corridor, inhaled the fetid air. And still we spin our knotted thread along the bench, beneath …
Night in the house of my childhood invaded more than corners: it crept into the soul, a golem breeding nightmares. Awakened by my screams, mother came to my bedside offering comfort. She sat there, a dark shadow, her glinting eyes in deeper pools of darkness. And I agreed that I was comforted, oh quickly …
My boys won’t eat. The youngest doesn’t swallow as much as smear and fling. As though he thinks food’s taken through the skin. I blend his baby glop, peas and carrots and little rags of meat pureed together by the hurtling blade, and when I bring it to him strapped in his high throne he …
I have a brother. I never met him. His name is Mark. He’s the same age as I am. Mark only lived thirty miles away from me the entire time we were growing up. I was in Lebanon, Pennsylvania and he lived near Harrisburg, the state capital. Our father, Billy Lee Wells, already had a …
A soldier on leave from the Garguantuan War, Maggie’s husband whistled the path home at the thought of her vegetable stew. Maggie would have beamed for his arrival had she not been forced to squeeze between enormous ankles, duck under a nose holding coats, to greet him. He dragged her out to display his bounty: …
for Melissa Ensephalopus is not an arctic creature, she says. It is in the line of sirens and sinuses, octopi and angels. No leviathan, or sexually aberrant penguin, but no study has been conducted. It walks upright on tentacles, though, has walrus teeth in a snake’s head. It doesn’t suffer from deep-sea gigantism like Architeuthis …
8:01 a.m.: A train whistles, and Godzilla cannot find it. A flock of vultures flies in circles. Godzilla, bored with smashing expensive buildings, spins, staring at the birds. 10:10 a.m.: Dizzy from spinning, Godzilla drops into a doughnut shop, and his tail dips in the deep-fryer. He roars and runs in more circles. 10:59 a.m.: …