J. Ian Bush

It’s the summer of 1998. I’m given a mason jar. Almost everything is black. My father hasn’t made me bleed yet. He jokes that the grass is high enough to disappear in. He smells like Budweiser but his eyes don’t reek of violence. There are lightning bugs. He grabs one.Continue Reading

By age five, his father was doing his best to make a man of him. He had unusual methods: 1) Burrowing both fists into the shoulder blades, elbows deep (this will teach him how to eat pain). 2) Sculpting his silhouette to fit some kind of monster. 3) Transfiguring hisContinue Reading

He heard somebody telling somebody else about some woman in New Boston who smothered her baby. He knew smothered was bad because the person telling looked sour and the person listening frowned and shook her head. But he thought smothered sounded pretty and soft like pillow or blanket. He askedContinue Reading

I used to have a friend who was full of busted light bulbs some of them I assume were hereditary (his parents were both black holes) but others he collected himself he treated his anatomy like a trash bag shoveled in as much dead light as it could hold onceContinue Reading