“The pain scale measures only the intensity of pain, not the duration. This may be its greatest flaw. A measure of pain, I believe, requires at least two dimensions. The suffering of Hell is terrifying not because of any specific torture, but because it is eternal.” …

The pain body is similar to the body, but its geography is different, its scale. The pain places are large, loud. The pain feet (when they burn, when they ache, when they try to run away to someplace painless) are bigger, take up too much space and start somewhere below…

“I saw Cottonball the other day,” you laugh a little and this is not how I want this to go, but I don’t know her real name and I don’t know how to change this thing we started years ago. “Really? What was she doing? Trying to kill you?” …

I dreamed I was on a spaceship powered by a virtual black hole. Its/our speed was sometimes (but never and always quite) the speed of light because the ship (plus me and me and you) was hurtling into the singularity that may or may not have exist(ed) in front of…

It was the year the Pearl River flooded the trailer park where we lived. The worms were driven up out of the ground rising to the water’s surface in writhing bubblegum pink bodies. Creeping up in ways you wouldn’t expect, the water covered over the things low enough and circled…

This is what really happened. They weren’t hippies, they were monkeys. I went downstairs to get a soda and they were attacking the vending machines. It was around two in the morning and the dorm was so quiet, like another place completely, an abandoned place full of emptiness and silence…