Fire: finger-sized ghosts of it, appearing blue in the night, one at a time. Here. Then there, at the top of the bush's silhouette. Now, at the bottom. Again in the middle, over to the side. The tight blue flame would open like a hand into a full bloom of orange, crumple into nothing in the black, then appear again blue somewhere else, erupt as a writhing orange again, then vanish. All that would be left were tiny scattered pinpricks of a smoldering red in the darkness. These would survive o...

And these signs shall follow them that believe…. So many variae lectionarum, so many qualifiers, so many subtle diversities of meaning spread out behind words like signs, words like believe, she thought as she contemplated her pale wrists. So thin. So weak. Thin compared to most of the other women, weak compared to nothing. Just weak. Human. The black lace, so little there on the cuff as to be mistaken for an uneven seam, the black lace resting slight like inky tissue dissolving against the ...

With a snorty snuzzle and half a start, Betty woke up and blinked until 10:30 changed from a hazy pink to a grisly crisp red on her digital clock. The kids would be gone; Ted too. She pinched from the nightstand a blood-brown prescription bottle, barely in reach, by the peeling corner of its typed and taped label. She shook two capsules into her cupped hand – not one, not three, but two at the same time, with unconscious skill. Sharply splaying her palm flat, she sent the pair of pills into ...

Weeping somewhere down the hall, the footsteps and jangling keys of a guard somewhere else, and whispered late night bunk talk, Holmesburg Prison, Philadelphia, 1958: “My great uncle’s job. He helped work the sound equipment for a radio show. That’s how. How he learned all that.” “Radio? Wouldn’t he be workin’ indoors doin’ that? You make him sound like Daniel Boone or something. How’d he know all those turnin’-piss-into-water things?” “Ali, you know that ain’t exactly how it works, and they ...

Glenda enjoyed her breasts more as a ghost. They had always seemed a little unwieldy, weighty, even when harnessed by the most technologically advanced bras. But now, freed from the burden of corporeality, they stayed centered and voluptuously assertive, softly symmetric with curves of classical feminine perfection. She liked her face better, too. Being translucent before the bedroom mirror was a pleasure to her eyes, which had once been a hard and glinty steel blue but in the afterlife beca...

There are many different kinds of darkness, and each has its own smell. The odor of minerals gnashed by time’s inexorable grind presents itself to the nose with an ancient dampness that cools and mellows the fragrance of underground darkness. The scent of underground darkness tends to put one in mind of a version of change within whose schedule a lifetime is immeasurably minute; a version of change that is a single protracted occurrence, rather than strung along the unfixed pettiness of even...

The throbbing disease which is the Oklahoma State Fair appears for only a few weeks each fall. On its opening day I had herded my low-attention-span nieces down its loud midway, through the lines that wound around the kiddie rides, and past the stinky stalls of variously awarded pigs and cows and emu and ostriches, and the dullness of it all evaporated the next day when She asked me to go with Her, offering to share ten hits of acid! With that question, just the sound of it over the phone, a...