mackwrites

You see a lot of things when you work at a hipster coffee shop. Artists, college students, business men, moms. The artists are funny because you can pick them out based on how either self-conscious or pretentious they are (yeah, the sticker on your laptop is totally cool, man). And you can tell the difference between artists and college students because the latter just look young and wide-eyed; plus they're always huddled together in groups (because going somewhere alone is terrifying at 18!). When the vampire came in, holding a rose, I waited for his order just like anyone else. He actually asked me for blood sausage. I said, "That's not on

The billboards were following Thomas. It wasn't that he saw them everywhere; that would have been too simple. And it wasn't even the billboards themselves but rather their message.  "Come visit Michigan." "Your trip begins at Michigan.org." Michigan. Michigan was following Thomas. As a student of the culinary arts at a prestigious East Coast university, Thomas had every excuse to visit Europe: to experience the food, to waste more of his parents money in that short window of opportunity known as "the college years," to hopefully win the attention of Jennifer Adams by the aforementioned spending of money, and, finally, to get further away fro

God flowering in March the tree bells together music this borrowed kiss will hold. I need to become tears as something old until: roses. The cathedral opens my very present union. You cut or tie and night joined us fresh vows and a blue city I am asunder; her eyes.

I exhaled in the September night and left a part of myself in the air, drifting ghost-like, a translucent body, a symbol for something with no name. I pulled the leather jacket closer, breathing in cold and the familiar smokey scent of Uncle Matthew, that lone wolf gone now from the cancer. The weight was comforting, the way it lay on my arms; it made me feel like I was part of the night. Part of the dark pavement, the long shadows, the cloudy sky. Spotted with stars, I wouldn't know where to look for the moon. A soft "ding" signified that Madeline had gotten a text. She looked down at her phone, face bathed in pale light as we walked toward

Robert had always enjoyed dressing well, until the day his tie became just another noose in a life full of things determined to strangle him. On his evening run the night before, he'd stopped briefly beside a boxer dragging a teenager on a walk. The dog rasped, his breath haggered and wet, spotting the sidewalk with drool. Later, Robert dreamnt about the dog, straining against his leash; a car swerved into the dream and hit the dog, who let out a strangled cry. Robert jerked awake, his body tingling, and lay with his eyes open in the darkness. He lay there until his alarm clock went off, a sound which set in motion the rest of his morning

"Look at them, Marcus. Take away their pain and they'll do anything! Father always said it wasn't human, but after all what's good about human nature? That's why I'm talking to a severed head." The mad man paused, glancing at the vacant stare and limp skin mounted on the wall. "Well, he's not here now, so it doesn't matter anyway." A knock came at the door. "What?" he snapped. The door opened and a man bowed his way into the sterile white room, holding a silver platter in his hands. "Idiot!" The mad man dashed the platter out of his hands, spilling everything. "I want alcohol." Smiling and nodding without a word, the man left. The mad m

Luckless I left you, opening and closing. Opening, empty hands. A stain spreading out from your palm, a tacky feeling in your fingers; a touch you can't take back. It's January and the shudder of warm breath hangs in the frozen air, sways as I pass, leans in to whisper things and dissipates before telling me. In my room at the end of the world I feel the beats between things like a thumb and a smartphone. I am moments between eyelashes and sodium, hydrogen, and oxygen. Water rushes through a pipe and I put my head against it to listen. A cat rolls on the carpet in the sun spot, stretching, furry. The earth turns under the guise of movi

perhaps this is not the best way to put it, but you're like ice cream dripping through my hands. tacky, clinging like sentiment, sweet against my skin even when the cone is gone.

if you've never been hit by an emotional freight train Well, you just haven't really lived yet.          no, but the thing is all the trappings and all the stars aligned and thinking you know what you really want-- life leaves land mines everywhere; in piles of leaves, in the upper lip of a wine glass, in bent photographs, in digital files you can't bring yourself to delete.          so when the train comes shaking the earth, making dirt and stones shudder and leap off the glistening steel tracks, there is no warning horn.

the wave rose in a great swell and hung, utterly exposed, the underbelly of things kept close to the chest, as I tipped back and looked at the magnified blur, settling, settling, settling, sand and atlantic mingling in a clear sandwich bag, a miniature opus, rolling out, unfurling the way trumpets do. he fought down the feeling that had sunk into his flesh, had sunk right through bravery, trembling, and granite, sunk because it was an anchor and dug in because that's what anchors do. there's nothing quite like the dark quiver of november, the molting of color, the tacky, corpse-sky, the grinding of the wind against bone, burning red-blue