Fiction

My cinematic education started pretty early. My mom introduced me to Humphrey Bogart films and my dad to the Marx Brothers and Elvira’s Movie Macabre all before I was a teenager. Later, I would attend Steve Byrd’s Basement School of Cinematic History (that consisted of a solid wall of VHS tapes from floor to ceiling and even laser discs) and John Schloman’s Arthouse Academy (that mostly involved traveling to the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland). During this same time, a number of my friends and I regularly went to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and then started a New Year’s

1. About a week before the deer trouble starts, the mayor of Westerntown is sitting with his wife in a swinging loveseat on their patio, and their three kids, the two boys, who are four and six, and the girl, who’s almost two, are playing. The two boys are in the sandbox that’s in the middle of the yard, building sandcastles, and the girl is pushing a fire truck around on a blanket that’s been spread out on the ground next to where the mayor and his wife are sitting.  As the mayor and his wife relax and their kids

“How’s your night going?” the man asked.  Mary looked into his eyes—his deep brown eyes, beautiful by all objective standards—and knew they were the eyes of a liar. He didn’t mean “Having a good night?” or even “Having a horrible night?”; he meant, “Are you willing to tolerate my attention, and thus sustain my sexual fantasies about you, for the duration of this elevator ride?” “Amazing,” Mary answered. She wasn’t leading him on; she was setting him up.  He grinned, falling into her trap. “Oh? You on a winning streak?” “No, but my boyfriend is.” There it was, as if

Michael Seymour Blake is just some person with a nice butt in Queens, NY.

For many years, so many we have lost count, a Stairmaster has occupied this room, an unsightly apparatus left to gather dust after a (short-lived) period of committed use, its panels and planks fading in the sun, the curtains on the window it faces left open as often as not by the owner of this room and the many adjoining rooms. The window once overlooked a sycamore tree, but it was chopped down by sullen men in gray jackets who arrived early one morning before the first snowfall of the waning year.  We were not expecting this uproar, nor could

Every spring, the inimitable Sam Berman gathers the finest writers in the land, and me, for the StoryFort Festival in Boise, Idaho. One of the writers who made the strongest impression on me at the 2025 festival was Drew Buxton. After one of his readings, I pinned him in a corner and bombarded him with questions about his work-in-progress, a novel titled Daytona Teddy Riggs (Hub City Press, 2026). It’s about a promising football star who gets himself kicked off his college team and then pursues the World’s Strongest Man title. To say I was excited about the prospect of

I was actually at the thing nobody wanted to be at.Taking pics with Asher there like I needed somebody to know. As if my dealer were the whole globe to me reading her poems like it was just me there on this rooftop but all the while in my periphery was a monogamous mosaic blur that pursed my lips into a neutral non-expressive smile moving my face not even a little and still it became most of what I could focus on but never really see. What I came to then and there was a conclusion about poetry that you

Your mother found the place on the website that back then seemed so novel and now is considered low-key evil. “It’s on the second floor,” she’d said. “They say there’s no elevator but that shouldn’t be a problem.”  As the two of you roll your bags through the streets of Brighton, you notice other people moving in festive clumps. Someone told you at some point that Brighton was a party town, a fun fact you had forgotten until just now. You and your mother are wrecked from the red-eye, and as you follow the map on your phone, leading you

I always thought I lacked something, a fundamental muscle or chord. While other children shrieked in delight, in terror, in exhaustion, I remained mute and unblinking.  At five years old, I was questioned, gently, by concerned adults.  I stared at them—they stared at me, a Grand Canyon of misunderstanding between us.  I refused to answer stupid questions. I heard the lie from their lips, saw the masks on their faces, and I was terribly sad for these exhausted, fragile adults.  I said nothing. The suggestion was made, that I would be better suited to the special education classroom.  This was

I despise smokers. With their receding gums and teeth like overripe bananas going black with spots. Never cheap out on anything that separates you from the ground: shoes, mattresses, and your teeth. Or their Duchenne smiles with perfect teeth and imported memory foam mattresses I couldn’t afford even after several months’ salary. *** After graduating from a liberal arts college, I made cold calls from lead lists purchased from companies that trafficked in personal data at an unlicensed real estate company. The office had a half-man-sized fishtank glowing with blue light next to the front desk. The small thermometer always