Category: Story

On a moonless Friday night, as Sabbath candles flicker low, a mysterious demon offers to reveal the truth of a family’s past. What Ilana discovers in the shadowy Middle World will change how she understands her family’s past—and the price of survival

This was the moment I’d been hoping for: standing at the edge where curiosity and danger meet, where every step forward carried a paradox of adventure and risk. A place called Amazonia.

A young woman discovers a piece of porridge has stayed on her hand after washing up. During another heartless hook-up with her less-than-desired girlfriend Derek, the porridge attaches onto the other, and her body is haunted by the staining of life.

A visionary encounter with death and the spirit realm, weaving Hawaiian ancestral wisdom with personal revelation about life, water, and eternity.

A poetic trace of psychosis as portal—exploring the spiral architecture of reality where madness becomes a window to systems of truth beyond perception.

When audiophile George takes a joyride after quitting his job, his neural indulgence on the Skyway proves disconnecting from reality has fatal consequences.

Mom is unhappy that it is just an old administration building, filled with stale air, empty offices, and cobwebby hallways. It’s nothing like the last abandoned mental hospital we got into.

“Lebanon meet Israel,” he said. And we looked at each other for a long time… We, the granddaughters of the old world, the Arab and the Jew sitting in the basement of the church in the middle of America.

Life abounds in unmeasured joy. We are flying things, crawling things, growing things, all breathing together in an unbroken circle. All know this, and it is embedded into our every cell.

A blocked screenwriter finds unlikely creative salvation when his wedding gift—a cage-bound parakeet—becomes his mysterious muse and collaborator in this surreal tale.

We are culturally adrift absent a unifying and guiding mythos. Archetypal story and art, meanwhile, given their inherent cross-cultural, cross-temporal, and self-authenticating nature, can generate unifying and guiding mythoi.

A drama of sex, death and vengeance unfolds between three Bearded Vultures (Gypaetus barbatus) and the parliament of ravens occupying the same isolated mountain valley.

“In 1992, I travel to India… I want to experience the country in the most direct way possible and especially, the Buddhist sites.” — one woman’s pilgrimage

Being the unlikely story of the Duke of Waddlac, Humpty Dumpty, and the ill-fated crusade which brought the “Cataclysmic Egg of Catastrophe” to Detroit.

In a work that blurs the boundaries between futurism and very recent history, wild imagination and straightforward reportage, this piece takes us through the phases of tumultuous transformation in our present/future shock. Reality ain’t what it used to be. Enjoy the ride.

Properly speaking, shadows are not those places where the light is blocked. In the earliest reconstructed languages, those places have no names, though the proto-word for shadow does exist. Shadows were the beings that lived in those places of blocked light. Through the corruption of time, they have lent their name to their native homes, been subsumed by them, been forgotten.

“The Second” was written for a speculative fiction writing workshop and very last-minute in its original form. I did the plotting and world-building on the fly, and basically the original idea was “what if the protagonist were trying to save their friend from a duel?”

There are moments when the world comes suddenly to a stop, when the ground withdraws its support, when a schism opens, into which one may or may not fall. The world then employs its archaic sleight-of-hand to remove whatever faith you may have placed in this event. The structure of projection has barely missed a beat, but the schism in your psyche has not actually been sealed…

It starts like this, the intercom buzzes. Nick, the reluctant pet cat, is faking obliviousness, turning around, padding over to the kitchen for a snack. His tail, way up in the air, offers me a clear view of his hypoallergenic pink behind—shorthand for open scorn. “Guess I’m getting it then,” I say, pushing back with my own attitude.

Seconds — those appointed to negotiate and if necessary fill in for the principal fighters in duels conducted by pilots of the Polarin Aerial Fleet — were allowed only one kind of interference: to try and talk combatants out of their folly, or to watch as time ran out and they went to their deaths. This was thought to be a way of reducing the number of frivolous challenges. It had had virtually no effect.

The game gives us a satisfaction that life denies us.—Emanuel Lasker ∞ “Tea or coffee, Sir?” “Coffee. Black. No sugar.” I’m on the phone with a market researcher. I try to picture a pretty girl at the other end of the line, but it isn’t working. All I …

I looked at him through the camera. “You have a secret.” His eyes widened. I continued. “It’s not something…bad…but you think it is…. Something about a confrontation with your father. And it has to do with…a female.”

Now is when you are alone, when you have nowhere to be, when promises to the world no longer apply. Nobody knows what happens now except you. This is your own personal history.

The Spiritual Barber had opened his salon a year earlier and it had been an instant success. Open Mondays to Saturdays, it attracted an ever-growing number of customers, who thought nothing of waiting several hours until it was their turn to be served. …

“Sex and God or sex and death.” I repeated his phrase, feeling a slight slur in my speech brought on by the beer on an empty stomach. “Is that all there is?”

​I was jealous of Pedro’s imaginary lovers and of his vaster sexual experience. Short poems, long poems, quirky poems, I read them in secret when he was out. I didn’t understand them. Poem after poem, sounding much alike, revealed the charms of some new image of his desire, even as he prayed for some kind of deliverance from his too, too solid flesh…

I felt that many kinds of patterns, of ancient origins, had been stamped onto our writhing, wrestling, male flesh, and that we had entered this forbidden zone many times before…

Whether I chose to feel my emotions fully, or experience the depth of them — that wasn’t up to me. That was up to God, or Satan, or whatever it was that controlled me.

Has the Shadow become more user-friendly? No. Whether now or 2,000 or 10,000 years ago, the shared identity of the Shadow and the Guide has always presented itself in the form of an ultimatum, which we must torture our minds and bodies to interpret.