Matthew Sam Prendergast
They had breakfast at the diner in the dark. Neither knew why. Their waitress was nice, though one could easily tell that she wished she was dead. He put too much syrup on his pancakes and some spilled over the plate and made a little pool of blood. He muttered. She complained that the eggs……
He saw her sitting there crying. When he asked why and she replied that they wouldn’t let her play, that that mean boy told her she was ugly, that when the ice cream truck came they pushed her down and ran for it, he said: “They wanted all the ice cream for themselves.” She found……
I was born. I found a pen. I learned to write and discovered why I was born. The pen was black. It felt indistinguishable from my hand. When I was not holding it, I felt my hand tingling, a phantom limb, a loss indistinguishable from the great trauma. I was in a bed. I was……
He couldn’t find her. The crowd confounded his search. Some moved in somber amble while others rushed about, compelled to some unnatural locomotion perhaps by consequence of being surrounded by so many people. Some jabbering in alien tongues, some taking photos of dead men, some speaking in reverent tones, some staring out into some well-tended……
The bead of sweat threatened to descend into her eye, but she decided not to capture it in the oil she spread about the canvas. After first creating a background of refulgent yellow, she added the fulsome outline of her face and filled in with meticulous, quiet energy the contours of her cheekbones and the……
