The merciless Kentucky sun was beating the earth, wilting the trees, and silencing the birds. Pay slouched in a chair outside his room on the third floor balcony of the brick barracks with a sweating Bud-Light can drinking slowly. He stared out into the trees listening to his screaming mind. His oblong red face, broken [...]

Water walls and solid air. I ran into my childhood room, climbed under the bed filled with squirming maggots, tried to hold my breath. I couldn’t move. I was in a room. Blinding light shining through large windows. A long wooden floor and shiny mirror walls. Someone started throwing stuff at me. I jumped through [...]

“Do I know you?” a familiar voice asks. I turn around slowly. The sun dips below the steel and brick buildings and the street lights flicker to life, filling the air with mosquitoes. I do know him. I killed him in that Holy Place as he preached love and forgiveness and the ways of Christ. [...]

This pot tastes kind of strange. Like a hospital, or a whorehouse. A stale rosy taste far back on the tongue and nose. I wash it down with a swig of beer. Walk out the door. “Where are you going?” Heather asks as the door swings closed. I walk down the long hallway–the worn red [...]

The sun slips slowly into the trees as the bullet proof vest Henry wears traps hot, musty air next to his skin. Henry’s heavy duty belt—bullets, cell phone, radio, flashlight, surgical gloves, handcuffs, retractable baton, weapon, pepper spray—is a constricting black nylon snake and a painful heat rash tears at his hips and moves slowly [...]

Pay follows the others off the bus into the muggy Alabama night. The air, more water than air, Pay thinks, is hard to breathe and he opens his mouth to gulp it in. The line in which he is a part snakes into a small white building adorned with the flags of America and its [...]

Pay is drinking alone in his room as he does every night. Sitting on a nylon chair, he drains beer after beer down his bottomless hole. The TV the only light in the room and bright orange explosions of napalm, oxygen and trees make shadows flicker and dance across the walls. Finishing the last beer, [...]

It gets so cold here at night. The wind from the north, fast and howling like a freight train. He tightens his scarf and pulls his arms and legs close into his body, holds himself together in his tiny hole. The machine gun stands ready next to him, but he doesn’t notice it. He stares [...]

I woke up late in the morning, my brain banging against my head, and looked around a room I couldn’t recognize. Dark bar, hazy car ride, strange apartment—these things came back slowly. She was sitting on a plush red chair on the other side of the room under a very large window. Reclined in a [...]

I had been driving up and down empty roads for two hours and thought I’d head back to the station. As Nick Cave says, “This is a mistake I sometimes make.” I walk into the harshly lit lobby with its dull yellow walls and walk up to the desk. “What’s going on, Riley?” Marion asks [...]