#o-bits fiction

[tweedsmag]

"She felt her charging heart secrete a poison that paralyzed her limbs, but only momentarily, until she too was swept up in the hysteria that harried her fellow seamstresses from one end of the shop to the other, like sticks in a box tilted this way and that." -Steve Stern

[tweedsmag]

"This is a lot to take on, to mull over: a thousand children trapped by a potential lack of imagination. It also occurs to us that we’ve become presumptive, as if we

 understand the power we’ve received, but not the way it can be wielded. For example, can you clone a memory? Can you clone pain or fear, and if so, can you clone a layer over it, say, resilience and courage? If you can, if we can, rather, then why not? Why not clone the truth over the painful lies? Why not clone the innocent lies over the truth? If such is the case, we could clone a children’s hospital, and subsequently clone whatever it takes to not feel upended over all the families milling inside. In our minds, we see Alzheimer’s disappear. We see prosthetics as gangly and as able as arms. We see the elaboration of time, and the way in which we might edit the entire portrait of life, piece by piece, making manual cuts into the film reels of humankind." -Scott Gloden, "Hopko"

[tweedsmag]

Students pluck the ground rich with your first lover. Sitting Indian style, they blow dandelions into wishes and unpack bag lunches beside the brick mess where for years you melted their blood-ties.

[tweedsmag]

It’s that hour in which the stands are ready and waiting even when the public trickles in and the Arabs come down with hair that looks like it is glued to their heads, the hand-me-down shoes that lost their shape after two generations, and those paper-thin trench coats that they must find in the piles of old clothes, which they love to go through.

[tweedsmag]

"I’d been kicked out of my homeland and by chance or fate had landed in this “paradise on earth”—just the opposite of Adam—and dreamed of our staying there forever cradled by the ebb and flow of the ocean." 

[tweedsmag]

Beards. Without his, he’d look a lot like me. Doubtless, that beard was what tripped him up. The reason someone began reading his email and tapping his phone and fishing his receipts out of the trash. Pogonophobia. It is rampant.

[tweedsmag]

"But I got a good look at the boy. Those eyes of his are maybe the only ones I remember. I can still see them like they’re looking at me, like drunk, tired muscles trying to lift something hard and heavy." -Eric Van Hoose

[tweedsmag]

I should have known I’d end up standing on the shore of Coney Island with a great big throbbing bump on my dick, and a rash on my thighs that made it burn to wear denim. People said I was crazy, they said I was nuts. I had a doctor who wanted to know the things that made me feel like having sex, so sure, I told him what was in my mind.