The Last Word – Part 3
Men. Men and love. It was like being in the driver’s seat of some huge American car, with power everything: steering, brakes, cruise control. It would start up and take off like a 747, with the windows down and the music playing loud on a massive, sunny six-lane highway, then slowly the day would cloud […]
An Open Letter to Henry Rollins, and Others: Or Fuck Henry Rollins
This blog post in in response to Henry Rollins’ article Fuck Suicide, which appeared in LA Weekly on Aug. 21, 2014 It will give you an indication as to my age when I tell you that Henry Rollins was a hero of mine. But no more. His article is arrogant, self-important, and ignorant. And I’m […]
Just Like That
Just like that, you might have… I can’t think about it. I can’t not think about it. I can’t push the weight of possibility off my chest. It sits there like an engine block, crushing me with parallel universes of outcomes. You could have died, before I even got to… Know you? Touch you? Hear […]
Podcasted: A Writer’s Seduction
The Last Word – Part 2
Carmen was sitting on the rug, pulling books out of recently delivered boxes and checking them off against her order sheet. This was not the part of the job she liked the best. Neither, it had to be admitted, was the proofreading sideline. The English language had its rules and she had met very few […]
What You Want
“This is what you want, isn’t it?” she said, tugging my hand down the front of her skirt and pressing it home into the hollow of her crotch. The material was thin; there was nothing beneath her linen skirt. The sound of drunken conversation leaked out into the humid air. The shadows lay heavy across […]
The Last Word – Part 1
One day soon, she knows three o’clock on a Tuesday will pass and the bell above the door won’t chime. The shop’s old floorboards will not creak under his weight, and she won’t look up, because there will be no reason to. He won’t come bearing coffees from the Starbucks up the street, smelling of […]
Laundry
What are these gifts that we’re given? These injections of time-released trouble, slipped between our cells so young and carried unawares into all our endeavours? I used to say that I was all my own, lived like a second-rate Aphrodite, risen from a sterile sea. Because to live another way was to acknowledge all those […]
Under the Livid Sky
With him, I can. Because he’s all bone and flesh, bear-big and fight-smart. And no matter how the madness breaches in me, no matter how blood-hungry its glory, I will never get the best of him. I strike him on the cheek, and he smiles and hits back, dislodging the sullenness of lazy lust. The […]
Carapace
In the dead room, tastefully done out in shades of charcoal, he comes again. A little slower this third time. His body goes rigid and he makes a sound like his orgasm has been wrenched from him with violence. As if I’ve shoved my hand into his gut and pulled out a kidney. Moments later, […]