We debuted the song at Harbor Bar (HarBar for short), a claustrophobic dive with walls painted yellow from years of cigarette smoke. Phalanx was still a three-piece then, but we were a full orchestra on “Thick,” exhaling the song like trees giving oxygen to the packed house.
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Old Man Gasper was a hulking figure packed all uneven and lumpy into a canvas suit that didn’t hang right on his body. It folded backwards around the joints and bunched up over the rims of his boots and gloves. He wore a gas mask and a mining helmet and he never took them off.
Read MoreLazarus and the Amazing Kid PhoenixI am running. I am running and it is good, I am running in the dawn–dappled forest and the new air of the day is sharp and good in my lungs.
Read MoreActaeonWatching Samantha do this stuff, watching her slam together pieces of little death machines and listening to her expound on best practices when building homemade incendiaries, seeing the shiny burn scars that peek out from beneath the collar of her shirt, trophies of the times she has survived, it all makes Nikki feel like a child.
Read MoreCuckoo GirlsThe forty-sixth and final verse of The Ardua County Sniper contained instructions on how to bring down the wrath of the Lord of the Gun upon your foes.
Read MoreFolk HeroColt was playing cards when trouble crawled in through the door, in the shape of a dead man who didn’t yet know he was dead.
Read MoreThe Drowned CelestialIt was even larger than we realized, half-buried in the cove’s sandy beach. Scales the size of cars covered its sides; the smokestacks running from nose to dorsal fin towered above the seawall ringing the cove. Its cavernous mouth moaned as the sea breeze passed through. Rigging and fishing nets dangled from its teeth; shredded block and tackle dripped and shivered in the wind. The great megaphone, perched atop its nose like a human-sized conch shell, crackled, but was otherwise voiceless.
Read MoreThe Behemoth BeachesI had come into some money and with it, purchased four hundred acres of land. I signed the lease in early fall, when the forest was a patchwork quilt of color. It was old-growth outside of Sudbury, east of the airport. On a clear day, you could spot the plume from the Inco Superstack, sitting on top of the largest nickel smelting operation in the world.
Read MoreCottage Country
I met him a few times. We were very civil. Just once, I was drunk and I’d said something stupid like, so you want to shag my wife? And he said, My God, you know she’d die for you, don’t you?
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