Dear University Office of Risk Management Please do not be concerned about the fire alarm that was pulled in the library last Thursday afternoon: I did this to test our evacuation procedures. I was concerned that there had not been a single drill this semester. In the event of a real emergency, everybody should have …
MORPHOLOGY: the Wooly Shagruth resembles a bipedal American bison. In place of hooves, it has rough, conical talons it uses to kill prey and drill into mountainsides where it constructs its nests. Annie is underground with her Secret Lover. They are in their meeting place, a cavern roughly the size of her parents’ living room. …
Jim Shepard’s was the first story I ever read in a literary magazine; it was “Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea,” in a 2002 issue of The Paris Review. I found it in college while wandering around in the library between classes. The story is about a group of lunatic German Messerschmitt 163 test pilots during WWII. It begins: I am Oberleutnant …
When I was seven, I built plastic models, scaled military replicas made by Revel, Taiko, and other Japanese or American or German brands with characters, English words, and other languages and alphabets sprinkled on the boxes like confetti. This confetti surrounded painted depictions of the vehicle in action. I could sit, building, for hours. …
There is no word for “freedom” in biology; in family idiom, no concept of the Self. Cruel monsters of my childhood still surface, lurking too close in the genetic pool. How can I stand apart? When will I be my own? In hostile mirrors I reflect my sister’s face and carry out the day’s routine …
No longer are my dreams long halls for monsters: people there these nights are faceless and benign, ready to waltz with me when threads of music knit the raveled sleeve of care. My nightmare enemies have moldered to the dust beneath my bed. In shadowed closets, they hung up their grotesqueries and departed, closing …
What if they are the true perceptions of your life, those thoughts which come at two in the morning, when shadows twist and shift like lunatics and darkness presses its cold fingertips hard against your straining eyes? What if the dull rage in the dregs of booze glazing the last ice cubes, at the …
They thought that we would go like sheep bemused and walking in our sleep, unmindful cattle herded deep down into the nightmare: the troll behind the closet door, the serpent in the dresser drawer— we walked the charcoal corridor, inhaled the fetid air. And still we spin our knotted thread along the bench, beneath …
Night in the house of my childhood invaded more than corners: it crept into the soul, a golem breeding nightmares. Awakened by my screams, mother came to my bedside offering comfort. She sat there, a dark shadow, her glinting eyes in deeper pools of darkness. And I agreed that I was comforted, oh quickly …