Over the next few days, I tried my best to make the place habitable, enlisting Eli for help. We filled up garbage bag after garbage bag of empty rum bottles and moldy old microwave dinner trays. For the glasses full of cigarette butts, I had Eli hold out a colander, through which I’d dump the yellowish water, then we disposed of the waterlogged butts in trash bags.
(more…)Tag: fiction
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Spirits – a horror story (part one of five)
It was bedtime when my six-year-old son Eli whispered, “Daddy, I think your daddy is a ghost now.”
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Reading Roundup – July and August 2025
I’m trying to catch up on books I read in July and August, 2025, so here are some capsule reviews. I already covered The Brothers Karamazov and The Violet Hour in separate posts.Books are listed in chronological order by the dates in which I read them.
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Book Review – Four Horses, Seven Seals by Ben Beard
Disclaimer: the author, Ben Beard, is a good friend of mine (and occasional writing partner), and he recently shouted me out on his excellent blog.1
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Book Review- “The Violet Hour,” by Katie Roiphe
This one hit me hard – I read it just a few months after my mother’s death, as I was trying to make sense of it all. It’s truly meditation on death, with Roiphe profiling the last days of a small group of great writers and thinkers: John Updike, Susan Sontag, Dylan Thomas, Sigmund Freud, and Maurice Sendak (with some “bonus material” involving James Salter, who Roiphe interviewed during the writing of this book immediately before his death).
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The Dirty Kids – The Finale
After the service ended, they drove back to Spencer’s apartment. As soon as they walked in the door, Sal collapsed facedown on the bed and began to snore. Spencer sat at his kitchen table for a few minutes, then left Sal sleeping and headed over to the library. About an hour after he arrived, Spencer felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He dug it out and saw a text from Sal. All it said was: “Gotta go.”
“Hold on a minute” Spencer texted back.
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The Dirty Kids (Part Six of Seven)
It was just past eight in the morning when they got to the Presbyterian church. It was the sixth church they’d been to that morning, driving around and relying on Spencer’s memory of churches he’d seen around town during his nighttime wanderings.
Sal shook his head, disappointed. “I told you, it has to be Catholic.”
“I grew up Methodist.” Spencer turned out of the parking lot. “I always thought a church was a church.”
Sal shook his head again. “Fucking Methodists.”
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The Dirty Kids (Part Five of Seven)
Spencer closed his eyes and the sensation of spinning was replaced with one of acceleration. He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as if he were on a steep drop on a roller coaster. His heart, lungs, and stomach felt flattened against his shoulder blades and spine.
He felt a sensation as if his mind were being pulled out of his body through a straw, and his pure consciousness, disconnected from his corporeal form, was hurtling through an infinite tunnel of time and space. For what felt like an eternity, he continued to rocket through complete darkness until he began to see a flickering pinprick of light in the endless field of black. As he continued to move toward it, he realized that this infinitesimal point of light, surrounded by endless fields of all-consuming darkness, was his life.
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The Dirty Kids (Part Four of Seven)
Spencer could tell that Sal was still pissed at him as they played basketball. The court was one he’d found during his nighttime wanderings. It was surrounded by a grove of trees, which served as a kind of courtyard for a nearby cluster of university administrative buildings. The offices were closed for the weekend, but their burning white surveillance lights threw strangely angled shadows onto the court.
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