In the morning, Paul expected to find Liza gone and little sustenance in her refrigerator. After a long piss, he found he was annoyed and correct. The fridge held at least a dozen styrofoam and plastic take-home cartons from as many restaurants dated and possibly categorized. Not much else resembling food, not even butter. He […]
Robert Hinckley’s face spread wider than his younger brother Paul’s and was poked through with a denser, stubborn stubble, but they shared the same shape and color of eyes. Their lips fitted in identical ways around words, and their noses were each similarly round-tipped and speckled. But Robert’s face was the original and Paul always […]
Liza sipped a glass of chilled chardonnay. She purred slightly as the wine trickled cold over her esophagus, temporarily negating the horrific heartburn from a spicy bowl of shrimp and grits she’d had at brunch. “I’m afraid to touch any of these,” she said. “I’ll leave sweat stripes on them.” Before her on a wide […]
Downtown, in the supposedly straight-laced Central Business District, the tall office buildings and more conservative hotels looked across Canal Street into the French Quarter like a funhouse mirror: the streets that overlapped had two different names and the grand facades shrank down brick-bound balconies, but the traffic was stop and go in both zones and […]
Paul pulled up to the curb of Nashville Avenue and walked up the brick walkway to his little brother Joseph’s front door. The giant two story house, from its storybook patterned shingles all the way down to the wraparound porch sanded so smooth you could slide on it in socks, was all Joe’s handiwork. He’d […]
It would have been more appropriate, Paul thought, to emerge into the late, hot dawn stricken with the remnants of a supernatural vision of his father in some setting heavy with gilded history. To listen to advice and wisdom from a spirit undeterred by the laws of physics or the guidelines of the afterlife. It […]
Paul pressed the buzzing doorbell and licked the inside of his mouth. The bartender inside hit his own switch inside and the door unlocked. Paul loosened his tie and took the last available stool at the cramped bar. While most of the neighborhood locals that occupied the Mayfair Lounge were affable and the bartenders just […]
Paul Peter Hinckley watched his father fall clumsily onto the seventh green of the Audubon golf course, his fingers fanned over the tight grass inches from the hole. He knew—in a way he would describe as “uncannilly familial” every time he recounted the story for years and years to come–that his father was dead. In […]