BLACKCACKLE

New Patient Intake Form Instructions: Please answer the questions, then return this form to the woman at the desk. Name: My Japanese great-grandmother immigrated to California. She shed her birth…

If this is heaven it’s very disappointing, I’ve the exact same painting and clock. Another not dead day, this one sunny. That’s something. I hear pottering and smell soup. Mary…

While waiting for my therapist, I flip through the DSM-V and learn that I do not meet the criteria for the following diagnoses: Boanthropy: a condition in which the subject…

“The shoes are cursed,” I mutter, as the number that’s always floating in front of my eyes drops from fifty years to seven seconds. I hastily pull away my hands…

I used to wait in my car for him to call. I’d sit in my parking spot outside my parents’ building where I was staying and look at the moon,…

As an older millennial, I find it impossible to date anyone who isn’t named Thad. It’s become so dire that I assign them nicknames: Trucker Hat Thad, Clown Thad, and,…

EVEN PLUTO’S ORBIT SOMETIMES CROSSES WITHIN Giselle’s funeral was awkward enough, but things got even tougher after the neighbor kid claimed that the two of them had switched. “Our luggage…

VIAGRA Three weeks after her ex-husband’s suicide attempt and somehow Helen was still taking care of him. He’d installed himself in the attic bedroom like some sort of manically depressed…

WHY I STOPPED WORKING OUT The snow is uncritically beautiful. It paints the slow steeples of alley way garages and abandoned minivans with cheerful postcard radiance. The cat gives me…

The interview, which had already been going unfavorably, took a turn for the irreparable when the glob of phlegm that had been lodged in Dave’s throat all morning fired abruptly…

THE NEXT WAVE They might think that our gym obsession is about exercise, a healthy lifestyle, a swimsuit body, but we know better. We say nothing as we steadily climb…

It was to be the show’s last season. There had been too many lawsuits by kin of the deceased. Still, ratings were astronomical. And Kris Calhoun was determined to make…

Our real estate agent, Bonnie, texted me about the estate sale. We had been in the new house for just over a month and had hardly finished unpacking: the cardboard…

Sniffle teary those few months after Spencer died. Poor sterile sod burned through life oh man as if stung by a thousand bees. Dirty miser thought himself. Special. And Spencer…