Eyes closed, an unseen lighter sparks in front of me and I inhale the first puff of my last cigarette. I can’t help but smile. This annoys the ones holding guns. It’s not that I’m not scared, but the absurdity
In the haze of the alley, on his way to meet a new companion at a fancy restaurant, the only thing Ted can make out is a gun, pointed like a singing sister right at his face. Frightened as a
My good friend Arthur died recently, in what is accepted as an unfortunate climbing accident. But it’s a real coincidence that he’s the only person my age I know who had made a will, and it just so happened to
The nurse quietly closes the door to his private room on the sixth floor, leaving Randolph alone with his estranged son for the first time in years. Trevor had flown in from Topeka earlier that day, finally acquiescing to his
I walk past a woman who could have been Catherine O’Hara’s second cousin. She gives me a look like she is, in fact, Catherine O’Hara herself, and she seems inclined to talk about it. Me: Oh, hi, good morning. Catherine
This isn’t going to be a long speech. But I guess I never really needed to say that. Because you would’ve figured it out at some point, probably the end, and either way you were probably going to listen, or
[Editor’s preambling note: All of this was written a couple of years before the author actually developed cancer, and I think before his mom did, so please don’t treat it as a plea for pity, or an accurate reflection of
The shopping mall is not a place I ever choose to go on my own. But sometimes, without even realizing how I got there, I find myself stranded under the fluorescent lights. She is in a dressing room at a
My father, Antonio Pizzaloni Sr., dismissed me from school for good on my fifteenth birthday. He strode into my Norwegian Geography class and announced that my brother was dead, and so I was now in line to take over the
A banana, an elastic band and an alarm clock sit on a bar. A banana, an elastic band, and an alarm clock. The three items that bring to the forefront a sense of my own mortality, and to a lesser
