Tag Archives: story

Vigil

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

When I watched my mother brush her hair, it made a scraping electric sound: vibrating plastic teeth sinking repeatedly into a fuzzy animal. I loved watching my mother brush her hair. I’d make sure to always stand behind her, so … Continue reading →

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Mayday

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

My mother’s grief attends nightly to her bones. It is a funeral in reverse, or a funeral in slow-motion, longing for a mourning long delayed. We stall ourselves in grief—idling, passive—and the freest parts become small dark birds tearing away … Continue reading →

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Knives

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   My sister says she doesn’t have many memories from childhood. When she looks back, there’s nothing there: a blank screen. I never asked her if she saw black or white in her absence of memories.    One of her … Continue reading →

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Dinner, No Voices

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   I waited. We waited. A storm was coming. It had to be. He had returned from rehab several days earlier, after having been gone for two months. My father had always born pouchy bags under his eyes, but there, … Continue reading →

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Mortuary

Posted on November 14, 2025 by John Biscello

Miko was a singer with her voice in the clouds. They called Miko blue. Occasionally, there would be flashes of red. In the fall, Miko would softly mimic the elegy of leaves and become yellow. She would, in voice and … Continue reading →

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Operating Theater

Posted on November 13, 2025 by John Biscello

   I have become moonless in my grief, a paled comparison. But to what? To who I used to be? What I expected to become? I feel as if I’ve been laid out on an operating table, and Time, as … Continue reading →

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That Thing With Feathers

Posted on November 13, 2025 by John Biscello

   As she moved her bladed hips beneath him, small dark starshaped birds tore out of her hips, scissoring the air, and were then immediately sucked back into her hips, as if by an invisible vacuum.    He stopped, and … Continue reading →

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3 AM

Posted on November 12, 2025 by John Biscello

Sometimes we wake up at 3am and we don’t know who we are, how we got there (where is there), why anything. Why at all. In these ghostly interstices, we try to locate ourselves in absentia—we awaken to no purpose, … Continue reading →

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Slight

Posted on November 12, 2025 by John Biscello

   A young woman came to see me yesterday. I know it’s my daughter, yet something stops the word daughter from coming out of my mouth, any of my mouths. There is word-daughter and there is daughter-daughter and word-daughter is … Continue reading →

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A Moveable Freeze

Posted on November 12, 2025 by John Biscello

   The first spots were discovered, and contrary to my sense of fiction, they had nothing to do with extraterrestrials or loneliness. Nor poverty. Soon, no exact timetable, but soon my memories would no longer be mine. I would no … Continue reading →

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