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 …
I have a brother. I never met him. His name is Mark. He’s the same age as I am. Mark only lived thirty miles away from me the entire time we were growing up. I was in Lebanon, Pennsylvania and he lived near Harrisburg, the state capital. Our father, Billy Lee Wells, already had a …
Leaving the airport is what frightens her, walking from the cocoon of baggage carousels and rental car booths out into the brightness of the California sun. Natalie loves planes, the enormous airlessness of them, the cold of the window pressed against her cheek, and the efficient flight attendants with their carts full plastic dinner trays …
I tell them there are monsters everywhere, but they never believe me. Not really. They hire me often enough—I even have to turn down jobs—but they don’t really believe me. Even now they aren’t paying attention. They know where their children are, and they can be there quickly in the case of a skinned knee, …