Fiction

He had kept the tooth pressed into my palm the whole time, and now it stuck there in a skin-pit of its own carving. The blood had all but dried. Watching it, I was momentarily convinced that the tooth was moving, shaking somehow by itself, but I came to realize it was, in fact, my own heartbeat...

A CRYPTID slams down from the ceiling like a soggy futon stuffed with gossip, hitting the floor with a sound halfway between a slap and a whimper, then immediately begins steaming—not with heat, but personal humidity.

The VW bus rocked and giggled inside, snowflakes falling like feathers that night on Providence. Drawn to the clouds of piney smoke seeping from the bus, I couldn’t cover my loud laughter.

I was sweating and the patrons and even Jones were sweating and we were all in short-sleeves, but the man wore a suit.  When the door closed behind him, he didn't sit down and he didn't go up to the bar, not initially.

Margaret, though, merely ignored her husband’s fury and squatted to the floor and situated herself alongside the shivering body of the wounded man and ran her trembling hands through his black hair and eased his head into her lap.

For me, there’s so much comfort and joy in just knowing the names of all the critters and the wildflowers, knowing that we are just part of this amazing world of dragon flies and butterflies and sounds and smells and the way the seasons change and that we’re all part of it too—

Outwardly, it was impossible that Marianne could be responsible for my current predicament, in fact she had been nothing but supportive and encouraging. Yet I had the horrible suspicion that she contained a hidden, inner self that I was not privy to.

She called every Holocaust Memorial in New England to ask if they would sell her a Jude patch. They all thanked her for her enthusiasm and respectfully declined.

Digger quietly cleaned up the torn dirt, replaced bits of bone as he could and buried others, telling no one of his actions or the causes. He had come into the habit of wandering the graveyard in the evening, listening for the scraping sound of tooth on bone.

“The old man winces in discomfort as the false narrative of economic growth washes over him,” she says. “But he shakes off the attack and summons the deeper beasts of his resolve.”