“Beep Beep Beep Beep”
The alarm swelled in volume until a veined spindly hand smacked it off. A moan escaped from underneath the down comforter before the mature woman with the short hair cut emerged from its folds. She wondered if today would be any different from the rest. She tried not to get her hopes up.
What is love but a push in the wrong direction? We took a left turn, a right turn – whichever it was that sent us in the wrong direction.
And I was never impressed by horses. As I stood with you, once, on the laneside while they passed – my disdain, you thought, reserved for the riders. What was I doing there, anyway? Why was I out in the woods? The open air, the countryside, the animals: a similar stink.
By Nicole Martorana
Something in her eyes said ‘No more. No longer. I don’t want to. That’s all.’ and it made me feel that this was the end. Worse than the shouting, worse than the awkward TV-watching in separate rooms, there was the silence – the endless, impossible, unbearable silence. It buried us all and we [...]
Phil remembered the specifics of the day he went shopping for a toupee. It was a crisp day, one of the first of autumn. A faded baseball cap covered his burning shame. Phil considered the generous patch of flesh on his skull an ode to his many failures.
The toupee store smelled like an OTB. A blend of cigar smoke and squandered paychecks. The clerk that came to help looked shockingly akin to the forty-five year old Denny’s manager who had just sat Phil in his usual booth-for-one, to eat his usual Sunday morning Moons-Over-My-Hammy…