My grandma rolled up my pyjama sleeves. I climbed on the chair. She finger tested the water before it gushed down my arms. A brick of rose-scented soap cartwheeled in her hands. The drain slurped it a...

This wasn’t Wallenberg or Love Park or FDR or EMB. It was Chimesy’s beneath the Nabi where Nelson Kopko donates plasma for chicken and broccoli money, dirt weed money, truck money if one of his Grind...

My best friend Sam and I usually drove his Pinto when we went out, but he hadn’t paid his insurance, so Momma let me borrow her Buick if I promised to have it back by midnight. Our hometown theater wo...

We flew out of SFO for Fort Walton Beach, Florida, my wife, my young daughter and me. I stepped out of the airport holding my daughter in my arms and my wife’s hand in mine. The humidity was so thick ...

Strasbourg 5 am. A heron’s heavy row across a blue July sky, over green gravel lakes beside the motorway. We’re sixteen. Hungover French drizzles from our English tongues as we waste away with the was...

Florida Joe jerked awake. His Army field jacket slid to the ground. He’d nodded off in the rusted beach chair again, by the swampy irrigation ditch that formed his property line. Ringlets in the wa…

The new teacher arrived like a prince, his legs scissored in his trousers, and all we could think of, us fifteen-year-olds caged in our pinafores with our chests bursting out of them, was that dangle ...

from TIGHTROPE: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series

S. Pellegrino — Wilson Koewing I NEVER GOT HIS NAME, BUT I’D see him on the first...

They drove from San Anselmo to Mill Valley for a Christmas celebration in the town center.  Both towns were in Marin County, just north of San Francisco,

I sat melting into a lounge chair by the community pool watching my wife and young daughter splash around in the shallow end. We didn’t live in Swaying Pines,

I sat melting into a lounge chair by the community pool watching my wife and young daughter splash around in the shallow end. We didn’t live in Swaying Pines, but we’d joined the pool as friends of…

It was late July in Marin County and the weather had been perfect for months. I’d spent the afternoon in Fairfax drinking beer at the Gestalt Haus with my hound Odie. When I returned home to San Ansel...