5 Sentences 10:03 PM

Each morning as she made her daughter’s school lunch, Samm drew an anarchy insignia in the bologna sandwich. The mustard nozzle was like a fine-point pen. She had no problem putting a perfect circle on the top slice, then the firm letter A with each straight line outgrowing its limits. By lunchtime, the bread would absorb her bitter little rebellion the same way distortion neutered so many punk anthems. Her daughter always swallowed the message fuzzy and indistinct.

A Story. (in five sentences) 9:35 PM

When I got home from work and found only my mother, she told me that my father had turned into a sparrow and had joined the others making a mess in the attic’s drafts and rafters. She had caught him in a plastic basket and was keeping him trapped there, fluttering and frantic, with a large leather-bound atlas to cover the top. The poor thing bore no resemblance to my father, but I fixed my mother a cup of chamomile tea and put her to bed early, my hand resting on her dear, troubled head until she fell asleep. Then I took the basket up to the attic and switched the bird out for the right one. My mother’s eyesight had never been good.

The Long Winter 6:17 PM

December: The snow wraps around the bars of the courtyard gate like hands grasping at your ankles.

January: In the orange midnight dawn, the streetlights are glowing discs floating in the fog.

February: Bobcats and dumptrucks spirit the snow away in the dead of night, turn the city into an Arctic wasteland.

March: New flour coats the black glaciers; the banks of the mall, battered into crystals by rain shrapnel, look like coral reefs covered in dirt or sand, piled over brick walls and benches like a tumor of barnacles.

April: Pink tree petals fill the sidewalk cracks like streams of blood.