After he died, my friend Episcopal Johnson was reincarnated as a dazzling and luminous shade of blue. We have yet to decide if this is an improvement.
We still sit in our favorite brick-walled coffee shop, surrounded by people who once might have planned the French Revolution, but now just write screenplays. He can't drink coffee anymore, but I can, and he asks me to remind him what it tastes like.
Published in Prick of the Spindle volume 2.4
First, there is no such place as Los Angeles.
Accepting that, the rules laid down herein will help you live there.
Been craving a burger. Big cheeseburger with bacon. Maybe avocado too, but avocado is so expensive now. Doesn’t matter anyway. When the Mad Cow came across they pulled all the beef. All the beef. No more real burgers in America.
They were worlds apart.
He was Mars, she was Venus.
They met like this: Research conference…martini glasses…ice…smeared lipstick…no condom.
Published in Blood Lotus January 2009, Issue #11
(To audience.) Hello and welcome. I am your playwright this evening. I wrote this play. I did. I am actually the playwright. No, seriously, I’m not an actor or anything. This is my play! This is how it starts: The lights come up and Hamlet is sitting on the deck of a ship…
(The lights come up behind the NARRATOR, revealing the rest of the stage to be the deck of a pirate ship. The ship seems messy, with ropes and cannon balls strewn about. HAMLET is reclining against a large pile of ropes. He is wearing a black T-Shirt which says “HAMLET” in white block letters across the front.)
My heart has a hole and black blood runs out of it hot.
*
Sometimes life looks like black and white. Other times I can’t stand the vivid, vibrant, melting glow of everything. The city is a beast but it’s sleeping. Life is a dragon’s dream. In the heat the black tar of the streets steams up like waves and it looks like the asphalt is churning and moving. The city realigns itself when I’m not looking.
She’s trying to train bumblebees and snails to perform in her new show at the theater.
She wrote the script over two weeks in the late summer, when the air was still hot and thick. It has to do with a love affair. “Romeo & Juliet with snails and bees!” She says.
It’s gotten harder to tell if theyre tailing me, now that the operatives have swappable heads.
Not that it was ever that easy to tell before. See, they would work in teams. Three or four or five of them and they would switch in and out of the tailing position at uneven intervals of time. So the only way that I could lose the tail was to make quick and erratic changes in direction. I did this, of course, after spinning around and snapping a photo of all the people behind me on the street.
So lets face it, it’s not like youre always easy to be around. There are a lot of reasons for this, some you’re surely aware of, some youre most likely not. Well skip the stuff thats juvenile, base or pedantic, like the smell. For most people the smell would be the first topic of conversation. Not for you however. For you there are other transgressions so abhorrent that they essentially transcend the smell. You have progressed to levels of soulless villainy so debauched that you have rendered your own smell meaningless. Not, however unfortunately, odorless.
Published in the American Drivel Review, Autumn 2007, Volume 4, Number 2
I always wanted to have the sex to a mermaid, but when I finally got the chance—some thirteen years after I first thought of it—I let it (her) slip through my stupid fingers. I was looking at her, all drippy and wet with her pale skin and long, long blonde eyelashes—which were blonde but with that kind of green aqua tint, just like her hair—she looked back at me. She lounged half naked and half iridescent scaly fish girl, it occurred to my stupid self that since she was a mermaid she would want to do it under the water and I can’t really hold my breath all too well.
For their third wedding anniversary, Cory and Summer agreed to purchase cosmetic surgery for one another. Cory elected for the vocal cord tightening—to reinvigorate his tired, thirty-five year old voice with a new youthful energy and a more pleasant inflection—he also went with the buttock and pec implants, the scalp seeding and the electroshock abdominal stimulus package. Almost as an afterthought, he also took the cheekbone regrinding and the cornea bleaching—the latter to reduce the appearance of the pink wires of blood vessels that crisscrossed the whites of his eyes.