Every late autumn, early winter, I get to thinking about Canadian musician Mac DeMarco. His woozy, chiming, angular, […]
Category Archive: Stories
Sheltered behind a dune in November 1856, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville raised their voices above the wind. […]
When I was young, the threat of violence connected like a punch to the gut before any actual […]
Recognition: the known way the sky opens as you drive up and over the level crossing, that awkward […]
The boy stood at the fence line watching Valdez stack wood. The ranch hand was burning the horse. […]
His wife died unexpectedly. She dropped dead in the shower. He found her. She hardly drank, never smoked, […]
In leafy, liberal Providence – capital of Rhode Island, America’s smallest state – the talk at dinner is […]
Lucy Lucy Lucy Lucy Lucy Lucy Lucy Lucy Lucy, we wrote, on the squares in our maths books, […]
With its massive lion-claw feet and its huge bulk covered in worn brown leather, my mother’s old chair […]
And I walk with abandonment, want to walk it off. Needing to distract myself. I anaesthetise myself with my child. I feed her. I change her. I play with her. I comfort her in the night. This night is different. She’s not here. I can’t anaesthetise myself from life. I can’t distract myself. I think – mental pain suffuses me. I take pictures – this distracts me. And maybe it’s true of everyone. We distract ourselves not to feel.