Brian Kenneth Swain

Anna thrust her key into the apartment door lock, turning it with a crisp clicking sound that reverberated through the dark empty hallway. She was still breathing heavily from climbing the stairs to her fourth-floor Manhattan walk-up. It didn’t help that she had stopped at the store on her way home from work, and was carrying a bag of groceries in addition to her backpack. She pushed open the heavy steel door with a creek, while dexterously guiding Max the cat to one side with her Reebock-clad right foot. It wouldn’t do to have him slipping out into the hallway, as none of the sixteen cats currently living in the building were allowed there according to their owners’ leases. Kicking the door shut with a thud behind her, she dropped ...

“You’d’ve thought he’d make it home…just this once. He could have at least managed that.” Sarah sat on the edge of the ancient living room couch, her torso leaned far forward, her face in her hands. She sobbed quietly as her Aunt Anne Marie sat by her side, one reassuring hand massaging her niece’s knee. It had just passed six in the afternoon, and the musty, high-ceilinged room still resonated slightly with the last chime of the antique mantel clock. The just-slightly-off-center ticking and resonant striking of the walnut Ingraham had been a part of the house’s rhythm for longer than anyone could remember. “He’ll come. You just wait and see,” Anne Marie said reassuringly. “He’ll come.” “No…he won’t. I ...

Terry Peterson’s life has been one of non-decisions. At fifty-four, most of what he is and does and believes are the results of either decisions he has failed to make or, in a few cases, decisions someone else has made on his behalf (whether he wanted them to or not). Like, for example, his marriage, which commenced shortly after his fortieth birthday and not because of some mid-life epiphany or even any greater-than-average concern about what the neighbors might think of a forty-year-old guy living by himself. As it happened, Clinton Pendergrast was his boss at the time—an executive of that all-too-common sort who deeply, viscerally enjoys terrorizing his employees—and he (Pendergrast) had also happened to have a daughter, Renee, ...

A dense cloud of highly radioactive steam billowed and swirled around the broken reactor pipefitting. The technicians before the control room’s large monitor struggled to see through the cloud, occasionally catching glimpses of the labyrinthine mass of stainless steel tubing surrounding the main vessel. The observers could also clearly hear over the intercom the piercing hiss of steam being forced out under high pressure from the fractured valve joint. The control room foreman turned for a quick glance at the radioactivity gauge in the center of the Vessel 3 control instrument cluster – thirty seven thousand rems, more than one hundred times the fatal short-term dosage for a human. As he turned back to the monitor screen, the hissing ...

If the sun were any brighter, fiercer, Randy would have spontaneously burst into flames and been reduced to cinders right there on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Hendricks’ house. As it was barely two in the afternoon, he supposed he had nothing but increasing quantities of this inferno to look forward to in the coming hours, for each of which he would be compensated but seven dollars and fifty cents, scarcely sufficient to justify the apocalyptic discomfort, certainly not enough to pay for the skin grafts he felt sure would be required by the end of the week. It was barely mid-May for Christ’s sake and already Baxter had endured twelve mind-numbing days of above-one-hundred-degree temperatures with above-ninety-percent humidity, ...

There comes a point in every man’s life when he realizes he is nothing, or if not nothing, then very little. Ephraim Pontoon realized this earlier than most, primarily because of the considerable help he received from his parents, who offered continuing reminders of how unlikely he was to amount to anything. It wasn’t that they hadn’t liked him as a child; they’d expended much of their parenting energy inculcating this view into all four of the Pontoon children. Ephraim, being the oldest, had simply heard it the longest, and had taken the message to heart well before entering secondary school. “Ephraim,” his father intoned over countless dinners, “the last thing this world needs is more people, particularly people like us. ...

Adriana brought flowers because she knew he liked them. Bennett wasn’t gone yet, but he soon would be, and the calculating pragmatism they shared told her to bring them now, while he could still enjoy them. Chrysanthemums were his favorite and she had been fortunate to find a dozen — enormous and explosively red – at the Shop-Rite just off Chambers Street. Down just a block from the store, trudging through the gray Manhattan bitterness toward Mt. Sinai Hospital, she had been accosted by a haggard homeless woman to whom she had given one of the flowers. Even better, she had thought coming up in the elevator to the fifth floor ICU, eleven mums and a gesture for a total stranger, apt metaphor for what would soon be Bennett’s ...

As so often happens in good stories, let us start at the beginning. Later, if all goes well, we will conclude with the ending, although that outcome, as you will grow to understand, is far from certain. Indeed, there is much ground to plough in the journey between here and there. Most of the action will take place in what traditionalists would label the story’s middle. I, employing perhaps a bit more hubris than is appropriate for such a serious affair, prefer instead to regard this central bit as the plot, or if you like, the storyline. In any event, to enhance the pedagogical value of this poignant vignette, I shall periodically endeavor to expound upon key points as they occur. The beginning in this case is a Thursday evening, let us ...

“Donovan,” she said, half pleading, half insisting, but looking me straight and hard in the eye the whole time, “we simply have to do it, and to hell with the laws. They’re ridiculous and anachronistic anyway.” I had only been in the door two minutes, surprised to find she had beaten me home from work today. Normally the city records office closed at five, and she would be back in the apartment by quarter to six, more often than not one to two hours before I’d get there. Catherine spent her days issuing and tracking government identification cards, processing property tax payments, and managing a myriad of other bureaucratic processes that usually had her pretty strung out by the time she got home. At least a couple of nights a ...

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past. James Joyce – Ulysses OH HELL, I say, remembering too late how much I hate days that begin with a curse. I am awake…ripped awake at three thirty two in the a.m. by a blistering crack of thunder and a tumultuous rain attacking my roof and walls. I know it’s three thirty two because the moment the thunder strikes, I burst panting from my dreamsleep and look over to the clock radio, which clearly says three thirty two. Two hours or so later I am calmer, albeit still awake, and in a disconcertingly transcendental turn of events, my clock radio still says PRECISELY-THREE-THIRTY-TWO… …which wouldn’t be quite so disturbing if it were one of those older ...