It was the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend, and time for the Birchmont Village City-Wide Yard Sale, an annual opportunity at the unofficial end of summer for the townsfolk to relieve themselves of their clutter — stacks of musty dusty books and piles of outgrown clothing and dented patio…
“Sometimes it’s a struggle just to keep my shit together,” Robert tells me over drinks on the patio, so matter-of-factly that he could be discussing the weather or last night’s scores, those games he watches, always some kind of balls on the TV. …
Billy works in a beige box, surrounded by other beige boxes, in a building full of beige boxes, and before this beige box, Billy worked in a different beige box in a different building full of beige boxes, and a different one before that, and one other one, and yet…
“Our ship will come in soon,” Sadie says as she sips her Bloody Mary through a plastic straw. “Mark my words — I can see it on the horizon.”
We are sitting at the sad bar down the street, at a high top table in the back against the rail…
Flirting with the bartender at that sad bar down the street, the stubborn stench of stale beer and cigarettes, linoleum floor absent random broken patches still sticky from the revelry of the night before, on a shiftless Sunday afternoon, the universe collectively hungover, or so it seems, sequestered from the…
It’s that thing that wakes you at three in the morning, with a gasp and a startle, brain addled, pulse pounding, the pillow and sheets sweat-soaked. You roll over to the night stand for a cigarette before you realize you don’t smoke anymore, quit years ago, but it still remains…
These were frightening times for the residents of Birchwood Village, with everyone ordered to shelter in place and stay six feet apart to slow the spread of this dreadful virus. For they were, by their very nature, a social lot, gathering together for numerous occasions: the Independence Day Celebration, and…
Why would anyone jump out of a perfectly good plane?
That has always been my view on skydiving. And it has also been my view on changing careers. I mean, why would I want to jump out of a perfectly good legal career? However, as I’ve been thinking about it…
I had to have been the only person to actually get slower at the Speed Clinic — a six-week training program sponsored by the local running shop for runners who wanted to increase their speed. But it wasn’t entirely my fault, or maybe it was. Within the first fifteen minutes…
Elvis in the parking lot of that sad motel in Pigeon Forge draped a pink nylon scarf over your neck and kissed you on the lips when we told him it was our anniversary, which I thought was bull shit but you motioned not to say anything, as if that…
