hic vigilans somniat
We’re in the back bedroom, my wife and I. Fucking. It’s hard sometimes to find the time, the moment. Children, work, day-to-day life — these things conspire and distract and exhaust. But we find the time, when we can. We find the moments, synchronized, together. And it is good. Perhaps it is too brief, too short. But we know each… Continue reading the short
Inside the house, people are starting to panic. The sky outside is dark and green, the wind bending the trees to almost impossible angles. We can hear the sirens and, in a house this old, there is no safe place . . . every room has windows, the elderly frame flexes and creaks in the wind just like the trees… Continue reading a tornado, two corpses, and a leather sofa
I am surprised to see a Ferris wheel looming over the downtown district, pale against the darkening sky. As evening descends, we make our way towards the carnival. It is dark everywhere. There are no flickering lights, no music — just the mechanical clack and clank of the rides, the muted murmur of the crowds. (This seems ominous now, awake.… Continue reading dark ride
...for some unknown reason, our family has been relocated to what can only be charitably described as “the bad part of of town.” The neighborhood is a congregation of cheap, prefab homes and trailers jumbled together with only the thinnest of spaces between them. The houses stand (barely) on two hillsides with the street running between them. Each house is a… Continue reading just another white trash weekend
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated May 4th, 2000] ...and because I have been thrown out of my house, lost any connection to my wife and children, I am living in an old building adjacent to where I work — downtown, in the old industrial district, where an empty warehouse is easy to find. I… Continue reading the girl in the warehouse
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated December 6th, 1996] ...I’m standing in front of a shelf full of journals and books in the dead man’s rooms. I take one down, finding [ILLEGIBLE] and poetry, handwritten recollections between the pages — it dawns on me that these are the rooms of my great uncle, the… Continue reading the recursive old woman
Three old men. Drunken and cheaply dressed sit in a library and make vulgar innuendos to every girl who walks by. In the background a brass ensemble plays Cab Calloway tunes.