Flash Fictions

cure for missing souls

At the park two children start biting each other to death. All the other voices joined in. It was a wailing chorus of distressed people. There was a crowd of dead men fleeing in the wind and they took with them the souls of the children. The Puerto Rican man who dives too fast zipped by and his wife sat eating pretzels by his side. The man's hands and his feet were decaying. The sound of people crying was coming over the radio. God said, All you poor people, I can see that you1ve been crying. And the people whispered back, we were more like ourselves than we had previously imagined. God said, you spend so much energy on forgetting and even as he was speaking, his hands and his feet were decaying, or, and even as he was spreading his hands across his people, his people were decaying. And the people said, spirit come back here-- I need you here with me.

Love

I remember this Yugoslavian cowboy painter who had slicked back hair and very formal Roman busts in all of his paintings. He flicked his finger like there was a cigarette and said No good. He meant take off your shirt as I paint you. You were left to think he was offended by the tones of your shirt and how they blended with the tones of your skin. Matisse sat on his balcony turning things over in his mind: mat, fish, bowl. Some people experience it as prayer. They have never existed before.

Pray harder.

we don't think we've been so bad.


Raising rabbits is not easy. No, no it's really not. If you get scared, e-mail me and I'll calm you down. Things being what things being.