Tag: fiction

I’ve got sixteen thousand books, alphabetized to the second letter… upstairs, downstairs, all around the house. Whenever a kid moves out, L-M-N-O-P moves in!

Ann Arbor Thrift Shop, 12:00PM, 3/20/2025

after Mark Dunn, no AI–or perhaps all AI–

writing with limits is intrinsically artificial. it is a rapid trial, a radical thrill. it gnarls a typist’s script and mars a stylist’s paint. it is an infant child’s Christmas gift, a first kiss, a last wish. addicting—is it?

a man’s brain is marginally plastic, and static rigidity will stymy skill. insipid filth brings implicit bliss—this is a fact that all “first-drafts” will highlight. a rising military captain, lacking instinct, will miss critical tactics; an aspiring artist, lacking clarity, will stain fancy paintings. war, art, and writing: a barbaric trinity that pairs familiar fabrics with variant stitching. anticipating a lack in standard instills faith in a man’s final ability, balancing titanic affairs as if by magic.

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They can’t call it KFC…

Why not? It’s Korean fried chicken!

Stamps Auditorium, 12:30PM, 4/11/2025

the recipe book is scrawled in shorthand, and you have left me to decipher it. a witches’ brew, a distortion of the highest order: in the bowl i mince garlic and seashells, add sugar to taste, substitute mint for jalapeño. a slap–to bring out the aroma, tainted or otherwise–and i don’t ask where you’ve learned it. a flutter of resistance: you tilt your head in the same way your mother does, did you know that? a scribble that asks for a constellation of lemon and thyme, no bigger than a pinch, no stronger than a drop. a signature, a token of unrequited silence, a butterfly beating its wings across the backdrop of the night.

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What’s a DILF? It says that on the shirt over there.

Don’t worry about it.

Michigan Union, 2:30PM, 4/18/2025

the present tense is a disaster of unprecedented magnitude. whether it is labeled a tragedy or a comedy lies in the aftermath: what has ever been borne out of company except misery? we are pulling the weeds and uprooting the corners of the house, a currency assigned to choice. the spiderwebs have long vacated; the ones that escaped are the first to be buried away from their ancestors. the neighbors are identified by the dogs that they walk–who is the one that is truly leashed?

I’m a moocher, I mooch off my friends, and my parents, and my ex-girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend’s friends…

Duderstadt Library, 1:00PM, 3/28/2025

those bygone years make fools of us all. the cherry blossoms trace the streamline of the river breeze and i wonder if the petals will reincarnate, if the koi will nibble at the pink and grow streaks of coral and rainbow. there is a songbird in the harbor and it sings of a better time, a distorted dimension, a eulogy, or perhaps a confession: who i would have become, and who would have taken my place. in another spring, the sky is falling on our heads–the impact will, for better or worse, make us none the wiser.

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Plus it opens up a whole ‘nother half of the world.

Yeah, and it shows that you are capable to love so much.

7-Eleven, 9:00PM, 4/10/2025

the art of imitation: copy the sleight of the smile, the sway of the hips, the twitch of a thought that pulls the corner of the mouth upward. i would like to love you, i think, incandescently. how did Humphry Davy feel when he invented the arc lamp? when he watched a wire burn without flame, cleaving light from darkness? a black so deep, a pull so strong, a filament that shines with the weight of the world. a backdrop, illuminated: i am removed from my thoughts, scaffolded, sterilized. destiny is chaos and chaos is disorder and disorder is the fabric of the universe, the term for a man with nothing to lose.

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I’m growing less tolerant of the people I work with, the people I live with, the people I want to be around.

North Quad, 5:00PM, 4/3/2025

the drip of the faucet, the stutter of the metronome. a parasite of the mind, i know that now–i see it in your face, a quiet strength, the concentration of someone trying to forget someone else. we must grow into death, an acquired object permanence: a child playing peekaboo and looking for a parent who is not there. a grandfather clock chimes from the ashes; winter weeps for the man buried below, and as persephone turns her cheek the snow dissolves without a trace.

Do you know anyone in high school right now?

Yeah, my sister.

Is she a tweaker or is she normal? My brother’s normal.

Science Learning Center, 5:00PM, 2/19/2025

imagination is a gradient of experience charted against naïveté. it is the tightrope between consciousness and fear, where a knife is seen as shiny instead of sharp. to be able to listen to a house and hear the laughter through its membrane. to be able to look at a cloud and see a cloud and not a butterfly, or a hibiscus, or a tragedy. a contraction–a contradiction–in a mirror we crystallize infinity and sell it back to ourselves. in this crystal, a tombstone: you are a name, and then a last name, and no more.

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I’ll be doing a lot of things this weekend, and by a lot of things, I mean doing nothing.

Chem Building, 10:30PM, 3/23/2025

there is a summer hidden behind the curtain of a weeknight, an eternity nested within itself. every day is a sacrifice and every sacrifice demands a savior. the sky opens like a slit throat, warm and gushing with the promise of a sunset, a scar that will wrinkle in the sun. in the shadow of the moon–in the interval between now and never–you will disappear into the black and i will not even have the thought of your face for comfort. oh, martyr! on that summer weeknight you became a hero to the world and the memory of a hero to me.

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With this message, do you think you are blessing him or do you think you are cursing him?

Palmer Commons, 4:00PM, 4/9/2025

and then suddenly, a tilt of the head and the heart is gasping for air. each sentence a slipknot: a mouthful, or a minefield? a rose, freshly cut, stem against cheek, dying between breaths–who is the one dying? how easily the words spilled from my fingers and onto the page. the ink bleeds transparencies, truths unveiled and secrets deciphered. your glance dissolves muscle and unzips bone, a medusa in media res, where serpents shatter glass with their tongues and turn beads of sweat into reams of stone.