My grandma studied for her PhD at USC. One of the professors in the education department, Charles M. Brown, gave a couple short stories he wrote (or rewrote) to my mom. He’s now a professor emeritus at USC. Who knows what he’s up to or if he’s still puttering around. But his funny stories recently [...]
Archives for fiction
WoFF: Aperture
This is the last fiction short of my Week of Flash Fiction. To those who read: kudos. To those who marked as read: whatever, man. Today’s is inspired by La Gamme Jaune by Frantisek Kupka, one of my favorite paintings.
He dozed lightly, one finger curled into the middle of a collection of Baudelaire verse. The [...]
WoFF: January
I wrote this about a year ago. It’s kind of a long one, but you’ve got seven minutes, haven’t you?
It’s cloudy today. The sky is a blank white, a modern art painting that disappears into the cold open ocean. Footprints dig everywhere into the sand, the legacies of last night’s revelers and of this morning’s [...]
WoFF: Dinner party
Written in the style of Thomas Bernhard.
He knew he had been invited not out of friendliness on the Berghemers’ part but as a point of interest, a half-line epithet used to lure people to their otherwise unbearable dinner party. He knew they would all be terrible bores themselves. Why did he come? he asked himself, [...]
WoFF: Snowgirl
Your head is aching. A screw is tightening and your skull is shrinking and someone has taken the liberty of sucking the extraneous fluid from your eyeballs so they feel like two hard black rocks, the eyes of a snowman. You are a snowman, a snowgirl. Your skin is flaky and cold and white like [...]
WoFF: get right
it wasn’t easy you know in fact it was real hard to do but i did it for you and no i don’t regret it at all how can you say that honey you know i love you so much i’d go to hell twice for you baby i’m that kind of sister. she was [...]
WoFF: Overcast
Sorry if you got like 50 million posts on your Google Reader. Long story. Anyway. I haven’t done flash fiction in a while, so to make up for it, I’m going to post a fiction short every day for a week. I wrote the first four last week during spring break. So welcome to the…
The [...]
On language as violence and silence as God
It is impossible that I am communicating with you right now. These words are little bombs, roadside devices that explode and spew fragments of meaning all over each other and you’re the medic, piecing things together. Whatever body of essential meaning I mean, by the time you get it, it will be busted fingerjoints and [...]
“A Story about the Body” by Robert Hass
When I was at CSSSA/Innerspark way back in summer 2005, Julia, our delightful, aging hippie poetry instructor, made us copy down the following poem. I’ve been remembering bits of it lately for no apparent reason and decided to look it up again. So here it is.
A Story about the Body
The young composer, working that summer [...]
Flash Fiction Friday: Desire & Spasm
The screen is black. Or blank. Both. It isn’t plugged in, it squats in the corner blank & silent.
She dances in front of it, hair curled in double helixes, ankles at obtuse angles, smile constant and wide. She shuffles and hums, hums and drums her feet upon the floor. The room is silent and she [...]
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