Author: Aaron Timothy

 Noontime demon comes to pray looking for the way to step atop the jungle gym and find a semblance of his place in the sun. Just a little bit closer. Just a little bit farther than he thought, and the noontime demon climbs down the wrung. One step by one step and imagines if he jumped straight down to the pits of his hell, and he wonders if it will hurt worse than it already does. But the demon of noontime is hungry, and if he breaks a leg he cannot gather up the morsels of human flesh to eat. So, he traipses on down, reinvigorated by his misery for he'll try again tomorrow and again tomorrow and tomorrow, and again.

Their Haunting My grandmother’s bones always crackle-pop when she reaches out to touch me.             Even now, as I stare at her, still within her casket, I can hear them. It’s as though the air collected up her life as debt, her body eternally singing  crackle-pop.             I imagine her reaching out and wanting to run the coarse thin-skinned features of her index finger along my cheek. From cheek she’d move to chin, try to press up. But she’d been dispossessed of her strength for ages. I’d oblige her, tilt up my face, flash her a smile, and then find a corner to skulk.             Seeing her there, it reminds me that I still don’t know somethings. Somethings that her preacher tried to sell in Sunday sermons. He’s only a huckster, only a chiropractor, a used car salesman, a bad joke.   ...

Milk & Cookies The drive is nothing special. In a Toyota Tacoma, iPhone attached through Bluetooth to the car stereo. Listening to showtunes because I miss being in musicals. I miss the Midwest nice, now replaced with Southern hospitality.             Middle Georgia is a snaking flow of hills. The bends and waves obscure, then reveal. Cars speeding passed on country highways. In the curve, it feels like sometimes it’ll be a head on collision.             The playlist on the phone plays showtunes, true, but it also plays podcasts, and the contemporary rock and role. One minute your listening to  All Things Considered,  then  Epiphany  from Sweeney Tood, you made sure to download the George Hearn version so the theater community back up in Michigan doesn’t feel the betrayal of Johnny Depp’s soft inflections. Then  Miss Atomic Bomb  by Th...

Mom’s Power is She They say to understand the now, you have to reflect on the then. It is not enough to look at the world around you, since it was shaped by a world behind you. A world that is past, but present. Flowing in you based on what your mother and father sculpted with; before you were able to take over the modeling of your clay. And their tools are the ones used by their parents, and the tree branches out in multitudes like a great pine of which you can see no discernible differences but that has been pruned and burdened with every bit of knowledge acquired. That is what it means to be a person, and then to be parent, to be mother, is to reconvene the lessons, and wonder what to trim, to cut, to bargain with your partner, with me, to figure out how to raise these little creatures. It is important to measure time a little closer, to not get lost in the because because because of the limitless echo of time, where we never step forward because we are always looking back. It is im...