Strays
Strays is a hodgepodge creative writing (and sometimes photography) collection, featuring fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
- Landscapes ()
“I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ by Alain Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along.” —Jack Kerouac, On the Road So much of it has passed through me, barely contemplated and quickly forgotten: The Landscape. How many trips have there been […]
- The Fear ()
As soon as the words came out of my mouth I regretted saying them. A few times a week there’s a police cruiser or private security making a visit to my strip of apartments. But did I really feel like I was beginning to paintbrush all my neighbors as trash, because some refuse to clean […]
- Future Museum ()
I was in New York, or maybe it was New Jersey because I could see the city off in the far distance. This was a new National September 11 Memorial & Museum. In my mind the phrase “hypothetical” was repeated over and over. It was a hypothetical memorial museum. Instead of being a location, a […]
- Salsa in Nashville ()
Discussion jumps about, though it mostly stays within a vague orbit around how the work that was being done seemed like work that was worth doing. Reflection brings history into the realm of binary: now only good or bad, seen through a vantage point which offers distance and clarity that was not entirely possible when […]
- Back to Today ()
If only as a gesture of ushering history into the past I walk through the doorway. You’re busy, with too many customers for one person to handle. The register rings and the line slowly turns over. I slip back outside, still unsure if you’ve seen me. Talking with a familiar face by the entrance, it […]
- Oklahoma ()
Travel back here to find solace, she says. This is a place to be cherished, visit when you feel the need to escape, make frequent visits in your mind… In the moment it seems so real, so genuine, so inspirational. These moments manufacture believers.
- Really Real ()
“The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.” —William James What a […]
- Miss Honey ()
“Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again. Do any of us children, she wondered, ever stop to ask ourselves where our teachers […]
- Her ()
The moment You escape the womb the struggle begins over who’s more important, You or Her. You grip to self-importance and fight to pull away from Her only to later take comfort in a series of others. That is, until one too many self-spoiled relationships justifies a brushstroke so careless that it dehumanizes an entire […]
- Danielle ()
She looks up from her hymnal long just enough to lose her place. No one’s listening anyways, she tells herself, before gently closing the book and returning it to its home. Her voice is beautiful. As she stands there, the chorus echoes throughout the sanctuary, alive with song toasting the trinity. The organ’s massive pipes […]
- Old White Men For Obama ()
I’m walking to the gym and I catch a glimpse of someone up ahead of me, standing behind an S.U.V. As I get closer I realize that it’s a woman and she’s taking a picture of something with her phone. As I get closer still, I realize that it’s a slightly-past-college-age girl taking a picture […]
- A Big Sky State of Mind ()
“Imaginary flirtations with the second amazing waitress of the day float through my mind as we drive home for the night, a bleak country-sized horizon lit up by the high-beams. I feel lucky.” Today a friend told me that it seemed like I “had just totally thrown [my] hands in the air” when we met […]