
MOVING HOUSE by Daniel David Froid
The crack widened at last and cleaved the porch in two. The tree had effected a crack that, the men saw, was surprisingly neat. The work of the devil, said Fred.

The crack widened at last and cleaved the porch in two. The tree had effected a crack that, the men saw, was surprisingly neat. The work of the devil, said Fred.

What’s it like to die? To stop being. Gone in a moment, carried away on the wind. Does it hurt?

No one had spoken up for me. Not a single soul on my street told the officers they had the wrong idea, that I was a pillar of the community.

He lunges into the dirty can and takes the cat by the scruff. It hisses and scratches his hands until blood drops fall from his hands.

How a mother could be so? Why when she’s in the same room with me I feel swallowed up by a heavy coat pulling me down?

The 84-year-old woman across the table from me describes a couple who has chosen to be buried in coffins stacked on top of each other in one grave.

The man clutches at his stomach as the attendants wrestle him into a straitjacket. By the time they manage to sedate him, the waiting room brims with new patients.

We had sex, he took my blood. Positive ions, positive feedback loops. The cycle perpetuates itself.

I’m in California now, where bees die in the light. Where everybody dies first, then lives forever.

I look at the baby doll abandoned on the floor next to its ripped box, its unblinking blue eyes staring back at me. One of its fat cloth legs has been ripped off in the fight.