He got up and cut the TV off. Nothing to see. He went out back to check…
Fiction
67 Articles
He had hunted here hundreds of times. These woods became his in grade school. He knew he…
He flipped the television on again. The cable box showed the time in big red numbers. Three-thirty-eight….
He knew his mother would be very angry. How could he have lost a single brand new…
Another mad inventor. Wild hair, thick glasses, a lab-coat with strange items poking and bulging from every pocket. His latest invention—the micro-text suit. See it hanging in its vacuum-sealed display case. He will move it carefully into a garment bag and bring it to the offices of the Board of Directors. They will finally see the fruits of their investment—of so many years and so much money. He will explain to them his brilliant concept and execution, how he has managed—through patented techniques—to molecularly print the text of any desired passage onto the fibers of this comfortable and stylish material.
The producers of HBO’s Treme have gone into crisis mode to tamp down another controversy. Fresh off the heels of the brouhaha that ensued when houses depicted in the advertising campaign promoting the first season of Treme were demolished following a high profile spat between Treme creator David Simon and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu over a feeble attempt by preservationists and Treme producers to save the doomed structures, preservationists have now turned their attention to the chair featured in the advertising campaign for the second season of Treme.
Preservationists contend the chair was once sat in by Hokie Mokie, considered by many the “King of Jazz” for a brief period in the 1940s. Mokie apparently sat in the chair during a rent party in the Back ‘O Town neighborhood later essentially mowed over by urban renewal projects in the 1960s.
Oh those men, those lives, those times, so fabled in song and story–a few stories, anyway, one or two songs; now they are mostly forgotten, but who were they and what made them do it? And what did doing it make them? Those sitter-outers of life. Those canny ostriches with their heads stuck in the soft sand of dreams while the earth changed and hardened around them. Those daring young men in their flannel pajamas. Sleepers we called them once, or VanWinkles, and once they did not mind such names. But eventually these labels struck one or more of them as derogatory.
This fall(ish) I have a new book coming out thanks to the good people at Red Giant Books. It is an illustrated novel(ish) and I am actually pretty proud of it. If you are interested in having me do a reading near you, know that my time and energies can be purchased for the small price of a place to expend my time and energies and a beer. And the beer is negotiable.
Did I mention my new novel was available in ebook form? And for a dollar ninety-nine !…
He first saw Alfia Furst on the corner of First Avenue and First Street. It was May Day and the sun was shining on her in a way it was not shining on the parking meters or the grey and melting snow banks that still lined the street.
He followed her all the way to the coffee shop, and then continued on without her to the dry-cleaner, which had been his original intent. At the dry-cleaners there was a clerk he had always found attractive but this attraction was significantly diminished today. He accepted and paid for his pressed shirts with no more than the required amount of friendly banter.
“My darling pet,” the bald ghost said to the frightened masseuse. “Your arms are open to me, my sweetest lamb, but they are open like umbrellas. Please, do not interrupt me with your soft mews of protest, your dulcet screams, your gentle skittering into the darkest corner of this all too bright room. You cannot dissuade me from my purpose. Let us gambol in the daisies and then later, when he have had our fill of that, piss in the bushes. ”
I will tell you stories. I will try to make you laugh. There was a time when people laughed and told jokes and made very loud noises. I am from that time, the so-called Silver Times.
The novelist Ru Freeman’s mother recently passed away and Ru has written a moving remembrance. This paragraph…