Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Elbow, is for posts that make us laugh.
While I was yet a teenager, the Nazis conscripted me to cook for their officers. As sous chef, I had to serve them breakfast. However, I had always been a subversive lad and so I hatched a plot. I would serve the officers omelettes made from rotten eggs and slowly this is how I would…
He had the impression the three drivers were in communication, waving to one another through their frosted windows. Then followed a succession of clicks as each unlocked his door; a sound of rushing air…
Certain fire hydrants suffer from performance anxiety, praying each time they hear a siren that the fire truck doesn’t pull up in front of them: “Oh please don’t stop. Please don’t stop. The last time a fire truck stopped here, I pissed a river and had a bladder infection for three weeks.”
The kid pulled off his jacket and, with an exaggerated flourish, hurled it into the crowd. Underneath, he had two octaves of black and white keys tattooed across his chest and the words: “Scales are for pussies!” As if that weren’t enough, he had “Fuck Hanon” in block letters between his shoulder blades.
While she waited for the water to boil, Amanda stared at her tiny head reflected back to her in the curved metal surface of the kettle, and she considered that maybe her life was beginning to feel as warped as it appeared to her in the kettle.
My wife and I live in antiseptic circumstances. High above the city streets, shuttered in our condo, it’s easy for us to self-isolate. Covid-19 is not the only thing we keep at bay. We’re high enough that we don’t get bugs either.
If the colour yellow was an animal, it would be a cat. It simply is and doesn’t care what you think. It bursts in upon your world whether you like it or not.
The skipping rope was made of green and pink plastic and had tassels at either end. It was long, the kind of skipping rope girls used in the playground at recess.
Tom and George sat on the low stone wall and watched how the tear gas, looking for all the world like tufts of cotton, scudded along the street and vanished through the trees in the park.
Apart from the tire swing, there was nowhere but the ground for Herman to sit, so he spent most of his waking hours with his legs thrust through the middle of the tire, winding himself clockwise until he could go no further, then unwinding counterclockwise until the spinning nearly made him vomit.
Douglas Coupland announced that his pet dog had died of Covid-19. I was a reporter at the presser and smirked when he started to cry. Other reporters scowled at me and accused me of being heartless and insensitive.
William had been brooding about it ever since he saw that tabloid photo of Harry holding the sleek phone to his ear. Now that he was off to America, Harry seemed to get all the good toys.
Garth Kaminski ascended to the throne on May 7th, 2019, the day on which the lead story on all the major television networks declared that Josh Hannon had died and on which the top trending Twitter hashtag was #worldsfattestman.
Ma used an agent named Helga Heimlich who showed up one morning to make sure I cleaned everything proper. There’d be no cockroaches, no bed bugs, and no half-smoked doobies on the balcony, not on her watch.
The protagonist goes by the name Louise. I don’t know much about Louise that isn’t obvious: she is a black woman in her mid-thirties. She may be a lesbian.