An earlier version of this story was published by Sixfold Magazine in the winter 2024 issue, available here. For moments now Jeff has entertained the fantasy that he will secure himself an entire row, two empty seats beside him along which he can stretch, lie, even sleep. Perhaps it is the tattoos on his face… Continue reading Hungry Ghost, 23A
Case studies
The medicine
Long ago, the grandmother sits with the elders and smokes the medicine in the pipe. She is not even technically a grandmother, so much as a great- or great-great-grandmother, an almost mythic figure who, from the vantage of her granddaughter, blends in with the land itself. But in this memory, she is just a girl,… Continue reading The medicine
Pontifications on Swedish beauty
Recently, my father and I took a two-week trip to Denmark and Sweden. Although the trip also involved a tour of the Elsinore castle, a cycling tour of the Swedish countryside, and a leisurely stay in Stockholm, I had an ulterior purpose: to investigate the stereotype that people of this region (but Sweden in particular)… Continue reading Pontifications on Swedish beauty
The rock
He comes to the mesa in his forties and the rock is still there. Long ago, fresh out of college, he and a golden girl had lain in the bare sun and made love on the rock, and it had felt as though a precipice greater than the mesa had been reached, possibilities spanning out… Continue reading The rock
The Buddha meets Hitler
The prospect of an entirely blank universe, an empty shell. Of course such a prospect is unimaginable to the human mind, but usually we substitute in its place four white walls, the equivalent of a film set’s green screen. Within this empty shell, sound would echo infinitely, and yet there is no sound. Does such… Continue reading The Buddha meets Hitler
Jackson Holzberg Buckley 