The whole class went fishing, last day of third grade. This was 1980. I remember the rods lined up along the blackboard like skinny kids hoping to be chosen for kickball. My father had lent me a light-weight black rod, spinning reel, three-pound-test line. Perfect for...
Berta’s cure for everything is some old-school hip-hop, a bottle of Brass Monkey and a trip to the Cactus Club. Beneath the bleeding Jesus picture on the wall, the stereo is crackling out a song I can’t understand until Berta starts rapping along, party after party,...
On those spring afternoons in sixth grade’drowsy, slumped back at my desk, tracing the letters of Sue Ann Finger’s name carved on the underside of the writing surface’I spent my daydreams trying to visualize a map of the unknown between a...
David sat alone in his unheated car in front of his father’s house and stared at the Christmas lights that circled the front windows and wondered if his father knew that this was the day he was going to die. He had wrapped the gun inside a plastic bag and...
While still in diapers, a boy gets his first erection. Lying on the changing table, he stares into his mother’s loving eyes, feels the gentle caress of the wet nap against his soiled bottom, and grows erect. Most mothers must laugh at the absurdity of these...
by N.D. Wheeler I fancied myself an artist; he wanted to be a writer. I took photographs, later picking them up from the developer with anticipation and surprise, always surprise, as though someone else had taken the pictures and I didn’t know what to expect. He...
