dreamszilla

Reformed troublemaker Nomar and his wife Maria move into the suburbs and struggle to get on with the neighbours. Image generated with OpenAI I'm not a badass anymore. Maria changed me. We'd met in a creative writing class at the city junior college. Maria got the top grade in the class. I got the second highest, thanks to her help. It was the first A I'd gotten since fourth grade. Fourth grade was when my dad went to prison, my mom died, and my alcoholic aunt took me in. Fourth grade was when I started turning badass. Maria's dad got me into the bricklayers union. I became employed, law-abiding, and even voted Republican once. Maria is so smart and good. She teaches a Bible Study class at an old folks home. I've attended a few times, poured apple juice into plastic cups, fetched cookies for those in wheelchairs, even paid attention when the story is halfway interesting, like The Prodigal Son and Sodom and Gomorrah. Maria says the path of righteous...

A man on holiday in southern Georgia has an unexpected conversation with an alligator. Image generated with OpenAI Outside, on the patio behind our vacation rental, it was hot at 5am. Everything there was hot. No one took the heat in southern Georgia lightly, in August, but the views were worth it. I had driven 20 hours from Minneapolis to experience the epic slowdown of the Georgia coastline, and I intended to soak it up, even if everyone else was still sleeping, recovering from the road trip. I lived to sit on the patio and watch the sunrise over the trees and marshland that stretched for miles before it found coastline and the Atlantic. As pink began to blush the eastern tree line my first morning there, I sipped my second cup of coffee and listened to the cicadas. Herons glided low over the reedy swamp, and occasionally I saw, or sensed, movement in the mostly dark. I wondered what was eating what. Just off the patio was a roll-down into the marsh. A small slope tha...

A Japanese art critic reminisces about a brief but formative relationship she had with a teacher when she was an art student in London. Image generated with OpenAI Opposite where we live, I can see, behind our net curtains, right into the living room of our neighbours' house. There isn't much more than a metre's distance between our respective façades and theirs, but the two houses are slightly offset from one another, their side wall being slightly more to the left from our position and I also have the sense that our house is slightly higher than theirs, but I haven't exactly gone out and used one of those tools land surveyors use. In other words, we see each other slightly slantwise. They seem like a nice couple, in their sixties, with two grown-up children who visit occasionally. I sometimes catch an inadvertent glimpse of the man or woman changing their clothes or even walking around naked. Of course, I look away, out of respect, although it's noth...

Quèfēng's love for Fènghuáng is such that she volunteers to become immortal like her, even though it means a thousand years of torpor. Image by Birkant Cakar (Pexels) "I love you." Quèfēng has shared an apartment with Fènghuáng for two years, and two years before that, they were college dormmates, but it's only now, after she's said it, that she realizes just how true it is. Fènghuáng stares at her for what seems like an eternity. "I'm sorry." She stumbles with her words. "I think it's best if we don't become involved with each other like that." Quèfēng steps forward and grasps Fènghuáng's hands in her own. "Is that because you don't feel the same way, or is it because..." she trails off. "A bit of both," Fènghuáng admits. Romantic relationships between a mortal and immortal never end well. She is young still, yes, but she has heard her progenitors' warnings and read enough literat...