drbailey's profile

    “Your shoulders are growing broad. Don’t you think ladies?” Mrs. Coldawood cooed on my approach. “So strong,” she said.        The other women chomped away. The sound was similar to so much cartilage cracked against wolf teeth.      My mother’s martini pals lounged with tacky fans. Pearls sat around their flabby necks. All four of them crushed walnuts between fake, steel teeth.  ...

You wake up in the morning to an itchy rash on the palm of your hand. This isn’t some sissy poison ivy, or the measles, or mumps. It isn’t even some sexual encounter’s leftovers. Don’t even act like it is, because you intimately know that it’s not. The rash is, however, itching like a bad sunburn -- driving you to the point of crazy laughter after your fierce scratching yields no relief. Hey, it’s better than crying. The thing is serious enough that you go to the doctor. “That’s a son of a b...

Vinnie’s Café found it difficult to fit the sixty-seven men and women that came to have breakfast with me. Not only was the café tiny, but the dead smell rank in July weather. When I arrived they were already dining on Eggs Benedict, maple bacon, and various freshly squeezed juices. I hadn’t even a chance to sit down to order coffee before one of the dead– a man who was missing his scalp – began the questions. “Did you find someone to be our killer?” he said, with a hint of immediacy. I igno...

The Crone crafted the puppet from flotsam, with a dull carver’s blade. With a brush he painted blue, plastic eyes and splintery brows, a flawlessly sculpted nose and a gaping, black mouth. “I made you to be, Happy,” the Crone whispered as he stapled a terrycloth body to the puppet’s head. “I made you to be happy,” he repeated aloud, only as if dizzy from paint fumes, contemplative in the presence of only gimcrack tools and loose slivers of wood. “Am I happy?” the Crone said to the marionette...

We falsely held hope that warnings would present themselves before an eruption occured. We believed that terrible syllables would begin to form on the backs of the simmering person’s Starbuck’s napkin. Cliché end rhymes such as: The boy was not a toy, but it was all a ploy against that a terrible boy. We all believed that panic would set out, displayed as red cracks tearing away at the blue in the eyes. But there was a terrible truth we refused to believe: that one could be wounded -- a very...