Jensen Beach looks back at Todd Cantrell's "Fitzhugh Falls" from Hobart January '11.
Cynthia wakes to coffee smell and the sounds of William getting breakfast ready for the kids. She closes her eyes and for a moment, it is as if everything is normal. Like last Christmas, the one
Lugging along next to me on the elliptical is an older gentleman – about the age my dad would have been – wearing two high-tech knee braces, fit with gears and everything, and what looks like an old-fashioned weight belt. He’s a regular at the fitness center, same as me. We’ve acknowledged each other on occasion and said a thing or two in the sauna, but never a real question-and-answer. I’ve always wondered about his knees.
When it starts to rain we cross the street. I don’t know where we’re going, but something warm and scattered is jumping underneath my skin. He leads me to the door of an apartment building, nudges me onto its small step. Then, smooth as a cloud moving across the sky, he presses his body against mine.
The Way We Sleep, an anthology of prose, comics, interviews, all about how we spend our time in and around beds was published this month by Chicago's Curbside Splendor. Currently on a "blog tour"
The A.D.T. man has only come to fix the security system, check each connect, repair the wire that’s frayed, reprogram the alarm before he drives off to do the same thing three blocks over. He wants no part in these people’s lives, he has no heart to join their quest for the secure, their rich man fantasy they can protect themselves, if only they will pay.
We imagine all nightmare scenarios, where you do not text us back because you are dead, and won’t we look insensitive for imagining that you hate us.
You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time in the evening. But here you are, and you cannot say the terrain is entirely unfamiliar. You are at a party, talking to a
Aaron “Jesse Pinkman” Paul and Mister White (aka Heisenberg, aka Walt, aka Bryan “Malcolm’s Dad” Cranston) are making meth in a cavernous and secret meth-cave.
You win the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect but your relativity theory is what makes you famous.
The prison is a test market—a closed circuit, a place where candymakers can focus on the choices made when options are limited. Research into what people will eat when they have nowhere to go.
On the one hand, it was tough for Tessa to be let go by the Internet company, but it meant that she could now fulfill a long-deferred dream. She opened her mountain office on a pasture just above
Derek barely slows down at intersections. Not anymore. Not since we got that card reader and “set out toward the sun.”
Right now, we’re somewhere in Virginia or North Carolina, barreling
No one called it a plague at first. We weren’t the kind of people who used words like that, words heavy with the suggestion of some greater force, but the idea was there, almost from the beginning, skittering around in the back of my head, peeking out into the light.
The table is in the room and the room has a table in it
On the day we come with Daddy down the mountain, Momma wakes us up early while Daddy's still asleep, pulls out white poster boards, markers from the closet, and together, we draw babies. Heads with black eyes, bodies curled, hands in mouths, a blue cord running from their bellies to somewhere off the page.
A tiny husband lay in a pool of blood beneath him.
The first thing was, everybody’s voices changed. Not changed deeper, like puberty. This was changing back: they went high, squeaky, like we were seven years old again. This is right after we all
Plates, large:
Stack in bottom row. Front side should face the rinse cylinder. Do not face plates away from the rinse cylinder. Do not stack in top row. If washing by hand, make sure to wash
Morgan Freeman makes me cry.
He was her first virgin, and he waited to do it in a bed.
We were taking shots at the bar before the bar, pre-gaming, game-facing. We did a round of jaeger bombs and Fixer knocked some dap and went outside for a smoke.
"I loved reading Exit, Carefully. It’s unusual, and in my opinion exciting, to publish a play without previously receiving a major production."
-Walker Caplan, Lithub
“Transgressive and immediate: you feel these stories shoot through and wrap around you.”
- Kyle F. Williams, Full Stop Magazine
“Lutz’s work is a marvel of the possibilities of language. Each of her sentences is an intricately crafted thing, deeply complex yet crystalline in its clarity . . . her command of each and every word remains supreme.”
--Mira Braneck, The Paris Review Daily
Garielle Lutz is the author of The Complete Gary Lutz, among other books.
