Spencer T. Campbell

Short stories in 140 characters or fewer.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

No one was surprised when his picture appeared in the paper, pinned by the collapsed bridge. He'd always had a way of seeming talked-about.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

They moved to Europe, bought a small country house, a car, a dog, and sat on their pile of cash. Slowly, they became day jobs to each other.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

'I don't believe it,' she said, waving the winning ticket in her hand as if it were crawling with bugs. Luck had pulled the rug out.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

The sky has been one long held note failing richly to night. I will sit here, won't eat. The face of things has gone to sleep.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

Three old women clung together like shrubbery at the top of the hill overlooking the town. A wager: would the boy see them watching, climb?

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

They'd finally flinched apart. Onstage, he played hurried, compact versions of all his songs, as though they were a kind of fist.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

One of the planks in the floor was loose. Lifting it, he found a box of darkness, a knotted rope. He's still tugging it out to find the end.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

Her youth, she said, had been terrible and still. She grabbed at his seatbelt. These days, she said, there was no slowing anything down.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

California: the Fugue State.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

The witches promised to carve their names into trunks and bury satchels of ripe earth deep in the bones of the house. One cruel cost bade.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

Returning to my childhood home was a sorry sort of hunting. My youth hung before me, helpless, inert, and exposed, like a skinned rabbit.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

I lie down in the grass and let the dirt rise between my fingers. Above me is all sky. Below, the Southern earth is loamy with the past.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

Time, this time, is a digestion. Could we pitch, spend, cherish, hang around together, remain as we are—recoverers in a house of fog?

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

My marriage was a kind of grocery list I kept adding to. And my thoughts were getting hot in the wrong places. Somewhere I'd digressed.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

Days here had a strange way of coming together, forming cliques, making him feel accessory. He pressed his hand all the way into the lake.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

She taught math to a group of vaguely disbelieving teens. Her fingers left faint echoes of herself in chalk. Her house dusty with living.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

She became for him a way of understanding how his life was narrowing down. He for her was one of the small forgivenesses she'd achieved.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

The screen door had been lacerated in the night. We peeled back the hanging flap, peeked through. Trees shivered as though short of breath.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

The man was a discoverer of families. He met them door-to-door, gave out his card. He carried their names along with him like loose change.

[Spencer T. Campbell @MannequinArmada]

I hear alarm in the late-afternoon language—which even I use—a rising, inconsolable complaint. At street level, the cars are in hysterics.