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…
Logic told me that Bart hadn’t poisoned the gum, but that didn’t mean that he hadn’t. He had offered to it me, after all, and had never offered me gum before. I felt my heart twist and grow black, the paranoia sliding down the slip in my chest, down into my bowels, my intestines. I…
“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 leaves were turning brown once again. They say the seasons cycle: winter is stasis, when the earth lies dead and still, but autumn is moribund, the down-chop of the scythe, when chlorophyll bleeds from the leaves, when the warm moisture is sucked, shrieking from the air, and only ether is left. Duck the death.…
Government institutions are funded by the public, which forces them to throw their doors open to the public, ALL of them, the destitute, the homeless, the mentally-ill and -challenged, those that can’t keep their heads above water in the free market. Those that would be chomped down by the sharks. I experienced this first-hand in…
As Siobhan and I crept up the gravel driveway to Ken Chang’s house, we couldn’t help but notice the multitude of very vocal cats blocking our path. They looked perturbed that a giant metal who-knows-what was accelerating into their territory, so opted to start mewing and hissing loud enough to penetrate the Talib Kweli I…
There must have been some sort of system-destroying intestinal bug going around the Alameda County Social Services building the day I arrived to pick up my food stamps, because every last employee looked like they’d rather be in a hospital than at work. I didn’t know how to get to the office from the 19th…
IN my experience, swans are assholes. Just THE worst. They’re like the pretty girl in high school who knows that she is attractive enough to forego the formalities of socialized ethics, so is just a raging bitch until she enters her twenties and realizes the rules are different out there. The problem is, being swans,…
Thomas tried to punch the number into his smartphone, but his hands were perspiring so badly that a drop of sweat slid down the screen, side-stepped onto the key pad, tip-toed beneath one of the buttons and shorted out the phone. He was not having a good day. Thomas, who traditionally coal-housed two packs of…
Full “Laptop Trilogy” with additions and alterations Oscar scanned the lines of foot-commuters, their pneumatic legs pistoning them up and down, driving them forward with whooshes and hisses of steam, their geared joints clicking and whirring like subway doors. Dogs usually had some dog in them, but a purebred bionic Doberman Pincher slinked past…
The Other Hudson Valley 