short-story
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He was the confessional without the collar. No stained glass. No wooden booth. No priest waiting patiently on the other side of a little brass screen. Just a telephone that was almost always on speaker and a man who could never keep his sins inside his own mouth. Behind closed doors, they poured out. The…
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New Orleans is different before dawn. The drunks have mostly surrendered. The tourists are asleep beneath hotel sheets they will complain about at checkout. And the dead finally have the streets to themselves. I had one thing left to do before I left. The cemetery gates were still locked when I arrived, which felt appropriate.…
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The woman in Jackson Square told me I had brought someone with me. I smiled. Of course I had. He had been with me for years. New Orleans was sweating through midnight, all perfume and rot beneath the balconies. Rain still glistened between the bricks. Somewhere down Chartres Street, a trumpet was playing something slow…
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The room had fourteen cracks in the ceiling. There had been thirteen yesterday. He was almost certain of that. He lay perfectly still beneath the gray wool blanket and studied the newest one, a thin black vein beginning above the window and traveling toward the light fixture before disappearing beneath a blister of old paint.…
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The road had no name, which was probably why she trusted it. Named things came with expectations. Destinations. Promises. Graves. She had learned enough about all four. She left before sunrise with one bag, half a tank of gas, and nothing in the back seat worth turning around for. For the first hundred miles, she…
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I closed my eyes because someone told me the answers were inside. I thought that was bullshit. Most advice given to people who don’t know what to do with their lives eventually involves breathing. Breathe deeply. Be present. Clear your mind. As if the mind has ever agreed to be cleared simply because someone asked…
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The knock came before sunrise. Three slow strikes against the door. Not desperate. Official. The woman inside was already awake. She had been sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of something that had gone cold hours ago, listening to the wind scrape branches against the roof. The knock came again. She did not…
