Debunkd

My name is Hana. It's spelled that way, so I'm told, because my mother during one of her down periods instituted a naming policy entailing "no superfluous letters". It's a hard policy to implement with girls' names. My brother's name is Jon. My mother had a policy for everything. Her father was German, which might explain it; her mother died, so it's been pretty much incumbent on him to be the explanation of everything. When I was younger, one of her food policies was "no sticky condiments." I'm sure you'll be pretty hard up to think of condiments that aren't sticky. It limits it to about pepper and salt, or burning tounge and eventual heart

We once played a game, you and I, when on stormy summer nights a howling gale would sever in two the heavy black snakes of power lines, big unruly things that slithered from pole to pole down that arboreal suburban street and, when downed, crackled with frenzied sparks of wayward electricity, of curtailed communication, of voices interrupted and dialogue derailed. Suddenly the house would go dark as a coffin; the radio's inane cackle would fizzle into perplexed silence; the television, my blazing idol, would in a fit of voracity swallow whole between its blank black maws the image that so transfixed me. The refrigerator with its surly hum wou

People expect that because we're both dull in conversation and obnoxiously good-looking that our marriage is free of turbulence and difficulty. Those who know us enough as to have penetrated the veneer of affability--the most resilient and decorous of defenses--and proceeded past the barriers of perfunctory charm have adopted the notion that our personalities, though radically, tragically different, are in fact fortuitously matched, in that two opposite extremes will somehow work in concourse to neutralize and dilute each other. They are asses, and mistaken.  In fact, Nancy and I are a desperate case. I am crazy, certifiably so,  and she is a

The dream had receded, withdrawing into the other half of consciousness and leaving in its wake a darkness made stagnant with the memory of a prior moment's rapture. The spell had broken; sleep had ceased; the strange narrative and marvelous absurdities had vanished. There was only the murmur of muffled voices and subdued footsteps wafting upward through the maze of staircases and half-open doors, and the same darkness pressing behind his eyelids, a separate substance from inky stain that seeps into the fabric of a night sky and fills the corners and crevices where shadows lurk and fester. Impenetrable and unremitting, it was a bottomless bla

You know, she wasn't always crazy. They tell you that these things come with warnings, like the 'drink responsibly' reminders that in their microscopic font undermine the urgency of their exhortation: letters like ants marching along glossy adhesive labels and willing themselves into invisibility; like the inscrutable black text on the side of the noxious-colored mouthwash that advises you not to swallow; like the carton of cigarettes that now, after languid smoke has interred a new lung-scarred population, advertise their lethality with the candor of their brand-name (but cigarettes smolder and ashtrays empty just as they ever did). I have

He was born into a family whose identifying trait--the trait specific to blood-relation in a way that facial similarities, second cousins and annual reunions were not--was an inborn tendency towards unlikely and spectacular death. The mental and physical degradations,  the regression to infancy and its debilitating helplessness, were tribulations that no Mackerty in recent years had been forced to contend with: no  linoleum-tiled senior homes with flat-footed nurses or abhorrent entanglements with incontinence and diapers. They were alien to the commonplace heart attack, the regimens of pills and the indifference of doctors, the family breakf

Nancy is not a reliable narrator. It's tricky business, and truly, the accusation is subject to question; I am in no position, certainly not from within the confines of these ammonia scented, lavender-painted walls, in constant earshot of the hazy-voiced lulling of patients sleepy with sedatives and the rhythmic rubber squelching of nurse's orthopedic shoes, to convincingly assert myself as a rightful arbiter of reliability. How can I,  when there is a veritable encyclopedia of documentation and a novel's worth of psychiatric reports that deem me anything and everything but? How can one confirm their sanity even after a single, wavering voic

Hollywood and its hills were now comfortably behind her. The noisy humming of entourage -- clinking glasses, braying laugher, shouted punchlines -- was now replaced with the vacuous, roadside quiet; and she, too, had exchanged her Hollywood glow, the aura of a designated Somebody, for the stark anonymity of wayward traveler. It was the first night in months where she found herself alone and able to move freely without fear of upsetting someone's martini glass or bumping shoulders with another actor. Moreover, it was the first moment blissfully spent without the company of Rand Hendersen and his peroxide-blonde "associates", or, on a decidedly

These days, you wake up to fresh water stains on the ceiling and the sound of your wife's ragged irregular breathing and wonder what cruelly twisted road got you here and why you ever followed it in the first place. You think of your mother, living on dry cereal and Vicodin and spending her days counting wrinkles, plucking gray hairs out of her scalp smoking cigarettes that don't smell like cigarettes. You go downstairs, eat breakfast that comes out of the microwave and tastes like radiation and look at Maria cutting her food and her bony wrists seem thinner than the utensils and she reminds you of your mother, so much that you have pour your

This is an age of disillusion, and I am told that love doesn't exist anymore - maybe, even, that it never existed. I am supposed to believe that there is nothing to believe in; I am expected to invest all my faith in the principle that faith is groundless. There is logic in it, I admit, and in moments of frustration I convince myself that behind every enigma lies a web of undeniable reason and irrefutable fact. In moments of despair, I am assured that mystery is only the manifestation of man's current incapacity to interpret the answers proposed by science. But this is consolation for the hopeless, and that is one quality that I have not dis