Zetetic

Premonition: The sense that something terrible is going to happen. Call it a strange feeling, like fate tapping your shoulder. You turned away from the guy who stared at you at the end of the bar, and found Tom sitting alone in the corner instead...

It began with a muffling. A rounding-off of the edges of sound, of music, of laughter. Of her voice. It wasn’t so bad the first night I noticed it. The night we fought. I took it as a blessing that the screams and curses, the sobbing from under the...

You Will Fall in Love With Another Funambulist His name will be Emil and he will walk the highwire as if he is one with it, swaying to a rhythm no spectator can feel, oblivious to the gasps and intakes of breath fluttering through the house. You...

there’s a minotaur in my labyrinth a microscopic monster who roams up and down, side to side, north to south keeping me disoriented one hand on the wall one over my mouth as i try to find my porcelain throne i know. that makes no sense as...

And I knew that there was nothing in the garden of tonight. No hint of silent tree frogs clutching silvered bark, curled amphibious fingers drifting out of sight. No wolves were howling low under gibbous beams of light in a longing that the upward...

When The Man with the black forest on his face stepped inside, it was one-thirty in the morning. The bartender, a cow-faced woman with arthritis in her hips, was wiping down the tables and flipping the chairs, turning the place off for the night...

I wasn’t there when you stepped off the plane into the desert. I was walking down Fifth Street, conscious of wheels scraping the runway. When I crossed Clemens Center Parkway, my ears popped and suddenly I could hear everything. I didn’t cry right...

I imagined her as a middle-aged woman, graying hair pinned up on her head to keep it out of the way while she tended the flowers, scooping fertilizer at the base of each one and sprinkling them with water from a green plastic can.  She had left her...

I’m sure I get it wrong all the time, playing archeologist to fragments of my parents’ lives using my memories and a small brush. Slept in a pool hall? Lived over the storefront? One morning I found myself woken by a child at the side of my bed...

I guarded him for thirty-one years like he was the last man on earth. It wasn’t easy. Even as a schoolboy in Lima he’d had an appetite for danger. When he broke his femur and collarbone racing horses, I protected his spine. Later, when the nuclear...