No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
I sprinkle shuffle wax on the shiny deck of the bowling machine. I concentrate — my hand on the cool metal puck, testing the friction before the push and then the folding of the pins and the whir of spinning numbers. I’m careful to stay behind the foul line, even when dad’s not giving me his side-eyed look to make sure I’m still there, playing by the rules.
...My godmother lived an isolated, sterile existence. She rarely left the house and had no interests or hobbies, nothing she felt passionate about. She had no friends. Apart from her doctor and her priest, her only contact with the outside world was my mother, with whom she spoke on the phone religiously, bridging the five hundred miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles each Sunday.
My Experiments with truth of a handful of hidden nuances sandwiched in the crevices of this colonial tomb in the corridors of our patriotic psyche...
I hope that when he is an old man he remembers skipping along supermarket aisles and Robert...
As our club enters its second quarter-century I find myself on a Darwin veranda with kids left for uni. I’ve started submitting and have once again felt the excitement of having proofs to read.
In an instant, she stands outside the door again. Her brother’s room. She’s been here before, fondling the doorknob, wishing to go in. For the first time, though, she has the key. Her breath quickens. Her belly seizes up. It’s been sixteen years since she last entered this room. Her mother goes in there, maybe. Her father too, before he died. Or maybe the room sits empty, has sat empty for all these years. Holding its own ghosts since her family closed it up the week after Evan turned eighteen.