Kate lay waiting for Gabriel atop a blue blanket on a narrow strip of sand between two patches of beach grass on one of the last wild beaches on earth. When she last saw him, nearly an hour past, he was loping into the ocean with his odd gait and diving head-first into a wave [...]
Sit down for a minute. I need to tell you five things in ascending order, each dependent on the next, each more difficult than the last. Once you grasp these things, you’ll have as clear an understanding of my love for her as I have. It won’t mean much, because the instant you understand it, [...]
On the morning of the day Norman “Twigs” Morton was killed by a vampire, he awakened thinking of his upstairs neighbor’s legs — more precisely, wishing his ceiling were made of two-way glass, so he might answer the jangle of his alarm clock by staring up at her long limbs. Twigs was a leg man, [...]
Not far from where I live is an old train depot, a decaying hulk of building that was once the community’s showpiece. A century ago it sparkled, a hub of activity, the nexus of all transportation, surrounded by vigorous manufacturing concerns and bright commercial ventures. But as railroads dwindled in importance and interstate highways flourished, [...]
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Vincent van Gogh started reading the Gospel with comprehension around 1876. He asked the local religious Corporation to give him a flock. They took one look at his unruly red hair and his unruly hazel eyes and they shipped him off to Wasmes, in the Borinage, the poor mining district of Belgium, figuring, if they [...]
The twin demons of insomnia and depression are inextricably linked, it seems, and my most recent bout of depression manifests itself in sleep patterns that defy logic: Two hours here, thirty minutes there, no rhyme or reason.
My shadow is unhappy with the arrangement, and this morning he simply refused to get out of bed. Instead, [...]
After the flood, the sky turns a robin’s egg blue unfamiliar during east-Tennessee summers, and it takes a few days of unrelenting sun before the more normal late-August haze reappears. A week of it and humidity rises. Walking from the air-conditioned cool of the office to the car is like shoveling coal on a steamship, [...]
About 2:00 this afternoon my Internet connection died. And I do mean died. Flatline.
I live in an area where outages are now a rarity, and when the cable modem goes down, it’s usually back up within 15 minutes to an hour. Not to worry. I go for a long walk with the dog, read a [...]
Joel and I sat at the bar in Sade and Dora’s Lounge in the Decatur, Alabama, Holiday Inn; we drank Heinekens from the bottle and wished they were Guinnesses.
It was a bright spring afternoon. Overnight the world had become radically green, and we were a little overwhelmed by it, sitting in a darkened corner of [...]
Because days are brighter in the Great Pyramid of Giza, nights are darker. When one goes there for a midnight picnic, as the Dark Child and I did some months ago, one should carry a very strong flashlight with plenty of batteries. Night has a way of overwhelming electricity in the Great Pyramid, swallowing it [...]