Fear, when it subsides, is like that. Like the cloud of mosquitos along with the occasional horsefly that pestered you all day, making even the walk to the beach a misery. That impenetrable cloud that finally begins to fade when dusk has gone and night has come and you have built the fire, sending billowing... Continue Reading →

Fear is like that. Each fear, individual, taking on a life of its own and taking flight, like some winged insect rising to join the swarm that dives and circles at you, as if your mind is the only streetlight left in a darkened town at the edge of the water. Fireworks over, we left... Continue Reading →

On the morning before I leave this place, the morning after the night I learned my mother had had a stroke and that was why she was talking crazy like that in disassembled sentences; the morning after the day I started a new job remotely and the one before I have to get these items... Continue Reading →

While my mind was elsewhere, my pen went running down the stair and out into the crowded streets of a foreign of a country. Once free of me, my pen did things my mind would never have dreamt of allowing. It went singing into the marketplace. It spoke the native language so badly and with... Continue Reading →

I thought that I was being wise that day the state fair rose out of nowhere along a highway in Iowa: acres of it with corn dog stands and a midway and a stall with a pig who regarded me through half-closed eyes from his bed of straw. When I passed up the t-shirt and... Continue Reading →

It’s not, despite the things that you’ve been told, those desiccated pages, poked about by men in robes with glasses balanced on the ends of their noses. It’s not whatever they find out, going at it with their scalpels and needle-tipped tweezers. Those exhausting ancient-sounding explications that make your heart wither and fold in on... Continue Reading →

at first a slow and creeping thing oozing up between the brittle cracks like sap along the bark of an elderly tree. Oozing, yes, like sap, but also like blood. You wonder if it could be a wound something to be bound up and put a stop to hide how it runs down the front... Continue Reading →

[disclaimer — this is a very random thing I typed after spending my day at the Northeast Indiana Beekeepers’ Association Field Day. I do not, in anyway, vouch for its quality. But here ‘tis.] Go. Or don’t. You should. Or not. Wait on the stoop. Drink water from a coffee pot. Life is useless like... Continue Reading →