Marshall was in trouble. Quinn could hear the desperate inflections of his voice through the blank verse of the text message. “Could you please come over?” …it read. It was a startling and unwelcome message to get while lounging naked in bed with your girlfriend, body sleek and satisfied from Saturday-morning delight. Maria raised herself…
She had brought him another crossword puzzle. It seemed like she did this at distinct intervals, but time was hard to measure when the light rose and fell outside the plane’s windows every few moments. They were passing through a dark time now, so Honey dialed up his tiny airplane light to better see the…
Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. -Pro-Ana saying Left foot placed two-and-one-half inches from the left edge of the scale, abutting the third raised line on the weighing surface. Right foot about three-and-one-quarter inches from the right side to compensate for a slight imbalance in…
He had cases of Nitrous. Actual cases of the crackers, what looked like 20-packs. The cases’’ ends could be torn off along perforated edges to access the crackers, like those 12-packs of beer that were designed to be laid in refrigerators. And, oh, he had torn them. He was on box two when I saw…
Rob had never been in this particular coffee shop before. Most of his contracts were in Alameda, so there was the reliable Tommy’s, the more gourmet Bean House and the sub-par Corporal’s Coffee, which he visited in a pinch. He was a lover of coffee. He took it black, the way coffee was supposed to…
Based on Kandahar 24 Phillips jetted up through the levels of sleep and was reversed-birthed through his mattress. He laid on his limp, sweaty sheets for a moment. It was still the middle of the night—he could tell by the thin air’s harsh edge. His clock had hit midnight—the new hour, the hour for new…
One boot: apply pressure to the ground, slightly shift the sand-silt away from the heel, the sole presses to the earth’s center (way down there, oh way down below)—the earth pushes back and the body overhead moves upwards. Right foot: lift it, quadriceps kneeing the desert air. The arid heat descended down from the stars…
An extremely short conference table squats in the middle of a cavernous corporate board room. Three men in their early 30s, Carter, Binwald and Vince, enter, all wearing stylish suits with the collars open. They are all coked to SHIT. Vince: …so I says to the stripper, ‘you should be tippin me!’ The three men…
Live Pete was in trouble with the authorities again. Whether they were the City of Newburgh cops, the Group Home monitors or the Social Services people, authorities were always giving him shit. The current shit that they were concerned about involved his little brother, Live Deshawn, who had recently gotten into heroin. Though the authorities…
“Fear is stronger than love.” -Tupac Shakur ~ He had read it in the paper this morning, black-print letters as moribund as a funeral gong: Suspect Nabbed in Drug Bust in Kingston But the real slant of the article, the bit that caused Sean’s mind to start whirling with sad prophesies was the name below:…
The Other Hudson Valley 