Don’t open your eyes. Don’t let them see where you’re going or what you’re about to do. In the darkness, let them think you’re still asleep in your apartment. Don’t wonder if anyone’s watching as Cygna guides you, hand in hand, down the long staircase into the bowels of the city. The metro is full […]
We were instructed to point the brush with our lips ––Grace Fryer, a dial-painter for The Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, 1930 1.Glow Twirling the paintbrush in our mouths to sharpen the point glow-in-the-dark watches airplane dials clocks in the company darkroom our glow-in-the-dark cheeks necks hands our radium tongues constellations of luminous dust drifting as […]
Claire was in the van across the street from the girl’s house. Ted was beside her. He had the gun. The girl – Margaret Stone – was bald and chipmunk-cheeked, just like her pictures. She was on the large front porch watering a plant, her movements like a child’s: broad, lumbering, graceless. She claimed to […]
He wonders if the bed springs know that they are different things from the springs in his body that clench and unclench throughout the night, instinctive in a helpless attempt to roll himself away from the fire burning in each of his bones. It’s the left side, hip to ankle, shoulder to ribs. He thinks […]