Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
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.
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.
The System woke the Agent twenty-four hours before it woke the President. That was the protocol. Twenty-four hours would give the Agent time to secure the bunker and to become clear-headed enough to serve the President’s needs.
Fenton pulled off his belt and shoes and dropped them into the plastic bin along with keys, spare change, wallet, and reading glasses. In another bin, he laid out his carry on, a small backpack in which he had stashed a T-shirt and underwear, tooth brush and deodorant, and a discreet baggy of cocaine.
All down the street we’d been fighting ’til we passed the drug store where Mandy saw the ads in the window and they reminded her that she was having a certain female problem with itchiness so she told me to wait outside with the dog while she ran inside to buy whatever it was she needed that was advertised on special in the window.
He shoved me into his change room and the plywood door swung shut like a coffin lid. I wriggled out of my jacket and trousers and imagined I was Harry Houdini locked in a cage suspended over a raging river.
Niels Bohr had nine items, one too many for the express line, so he had to wait in a regular line behind a woman with five snot-nosed kids and two buggies overflowing with groceries. Bohr wondered if something had happened to the space-time continuum to make his wait in line seem more interminable than it already was.
It started with a three-day blackout. They got the grid online again, but never back to the way it was. From then on, there were rolling blackouts, at least a couple hours each day. There was talk of crumbling infrastructure, but that was only half the problem.
Through an act of subterfuge, Mandy got Lloyd into emerge. She sat him down in a waiting room of scraped knees and moaning bandaged heads and said she had to go to the counter and request an old x-ray she’d forgotten to pick up.
I can’t remember how I got here, but it feels like I’m in a TV series. Maybe you know the one. A plane crashes near an uncharted island in the middle of an unspecified ocean. The survivors confront various challenges, including their own sordid pasts.
Like all other superheroes, Cockroach-man had a special power, which was the power to endure. He could endure the worst trials, and even when his enemies had been swallowed up in the mists of time, he would scamper along the broken ground and find his way back into the light while poignant violins wept in the background.
There’s a war coming. That’s what Brian’s mom said when she gave us some of the cookies she’d baked. We’d been playing in the fort Brian made in his basement, shooting each other in the legs with our BB guns. While we ate our cookies, Brian’s mom told us about the Book of Revelation and how, inside that book, it said there’s a war coming.