dreamszilla

An Italian immigrant in New York tries to carve out a living, but wonders if the best years of his life are behind him. Image generated with OpenAI I was ten when my feet touched Ellis Island. Carmela, my mother, held onto my snot-wipe jacket sleeve as we jostled among the huddled steerage masses, ravaged by seasickness, yearning to breathe anything but coal ash fumes and vomit. We clomped down the steamship's wooden gangplank onto the dock in New York Bay. I was the Sun, the center of my mother's world, and she was Venus, orbiting: dark-hair, blue-eyes, and pale, the most beautiful woman in the world. Inside the Immigrant Inspection Station, a doctor in a white coat saw my runny nose and spoke gruff gobbledygook to a tall man with a black mustache who marked me with blue chalk, earmarking us for a few days of quarantine where we dined on prison-quality slop. My father, Nunzio, left Naples before I was born. He stole watermelons from an aristocrat's farm, and ...

An unconventional romance set in an alternative past where clockwork technology reigns; first published in Phantasmical Contraptions & More Errors by JayHenge Publishing, 2022. Image generated with OpenAI When Frédérick Caron received the French country house address from the agency, he smiled at the prospect of the challenge. The eccentric American widow, Mrs. Tilbury, turned away several men already without giving clear reasons. Her application said she was looking for "a young man under thirty years of age, one who speaks good English, is handsome, polite, accommodating, debonair, more than reasonably intelligent, and - if possible - a dashing foreigner." Of course, there were many men at the agency who met those criteria. But none as well as Frédérick, at least according to himself. As for the first requirement, he was nearly a decade younger than the age limit. His English was impeccable. And no one would believe for a moment that he didn't meet or...

Demon-summoning black metal singer Charlie decides to trade in his mother for a new model. Image generated with OpenAI "It's always clean up after yourself, mow the lawn, put it back in my purse, get a real job, stop trying to summon entities..." "Is that it?" the guy behind the desk, Mr. Parker, asks, after I trail off, reliving the trauma. There's so much trauma. He flips around his laptop screen, showing me the bulleted list. "Probably not," I say, "but it gets you in the ballpark. Although you forgot amp volume." "Is it essential?" Parker asks. "What do you think? Ma can't stand anything above three, which - you play guitar?" He shakes his head. "Well, three is a joke." He adds Amp volume to the list. Who knew the future could be like this? Forget flying cars. This, now this is the future: trading moms in. And, I mean, why not? Why not get a say in the matter? This is the...

As she transitions into adulthood, theatre-loving libertine Gretchen has a complicated relationship with troubled fabulist Phil. Image generated with OpenAI If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames. - Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double I met Phil the summer before my senior year in high school, in my friend Sadie's new kitchen. Sadie, who was a year older than me, had registered for arts classes at a local community college and rented a dilapidated house on Craigie Street. The house was in Somerville, aka Slumerville, the wayward sister of relatively uptight Cambridge where we had both had grown up. I was still living with my parents, performing comedies of manners with my mom, whereas Sadie's apartment was a stage set for gritty drama. The refrigerator was a violent shade of mustard, and the cabinets seemed craft...