Selected Stories 
This is a selection of Damian Dressick's stories.

Click a story's title to see the full text.
Worship, Kinship, Imitation, Flattery (online, Hot Metal Bridge, Spring 2011)
  Three-quarters through a handle of Early Times, my wife and I celebrate the memory of noted American author Raymond Carver. I call nine-year-old Eric, “her mouthy teenage son.” She heaves my shoes across the yard. An ashtray sails through the stormdoor of the rental house. She makes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead of ham. I throw them on the kitchen floor. She kicks the dog and sulks against the chimney, staining a blouse.
   
Life Lesson (online, Smokelong Quarterly, December 2010)
  It's 1972 and the war, unpopular now even in the suburbs, sputters on. My father, not a Buddhist monk, nonetheless flirts with self immolation. Slumped on our blacktop drive next to the Roadmaster, he's poured a quart of Fleischmann's gin down the front of his chest and his left hand toys with the wheel of a Zippo. "Alice," he shouts to my mother. "Alice, get out here." When my mom, beehive blond and rayon-ed, comes rustling through the screen door, he smears some of the gin into his hair, a splash across his whiskery face. "Have this baby," he tells her, "I swear I'll go up like Dresden." Even as my mother sprays him down with the garden hose, calls for my uncle in the house across the street, my father is laughing. "I can do this any time, Alice," he says.
   
Losing the Light (online, The Barcelona Review, October 2010)
  It was right when I moved out of Los Angeles County that I bought both the four-wheel drive and the handgun. The former was purchased to cart all my stuff back east after my second wife tossed me out of her Spanish-style house in the Hollywood Hills. The latter acquisition had nothing to do with either that ex-wife or the other one.
   
Auto Destruct (online, elimae, May 2010)
  The students all wrote about car accidents. One by one, two at a time, sometimes whole vehicles at once -- packed as if with circus clowns—the students killed off their parents, siblings, friends and lovers. Some, they decapitated. Some bled out. Some were made to suffer for years on lumpy suburban hospital beds in comas as even their most dutiful chums said "fuck it" and swapped strained afternoon visits for boyfriends or Wii tennis or new water bongs packed with hydroponically grown pot.
   
This Is Not a Story About Last Chances (online, JMWW, Spring 2010)
  I remember the night you brought home the dog. It was maybe three a.m. and I had to get up for breakfast with my boss to discuss the quarter's paltry sales numbers. Because the garage door opener was on the fritz and you felt strongly that you had to get the dog into the basement (couldn't leave it in the convertible, it might jump out), you had to sequester our shepherd in the bedroom. I woke the first time when you opened the door and shoved Bart inside—whining and nails scraping on the hardwood—so you could coax the stray through the house.
   
Ab Initio (Dos Passos Review, Winter 2010)
  Available for purchase here.
   
Accrual (Issue #55 of Gargoyle Magazine, Winter 2009 (nominated for a Pushcart Prize))
  Available for purchase here.
   
I Know You Rider (online, Issue IV, Volume I of Connotation Press, December 2009)
  It's mid-August 1999―the boomi-est of the boom years―and I'm speeding across the Williamsburg bridge in a new convertible bought on impulse in northern New Jersey.  Loud enough to make efforts at conversation futile and so catchy that singing along while slapping palms together over one's head feels obligatory, the O'Jays "Love Train"―presently experiencing a sudden surge of popularity among a certain set due to its prominent placement in the Whit Stillman film The Last Days of Disco―screams from the radio, echoing above the East River's oily dark.
   
Stripper (Issue One of blue-eyed boy bait, Fall 2009)
  Available for purchase here.
   
Scalene (online, Issue 27 of Right Hand Pointing, July 2009)
  The baby still isn’t sleeping, so my mom jerks the Toyota onto the causeway for another lap, ignoring the fact that I have a test in Fundamentals of Geometry first thing tomorrow morning. She’s humming along with the radio and won’t look over to see me glaring out the window like I’m about to pull a Carrie on every living thing in Mississippi from the millshacks to the canebreaks to this tar-shining highway that called her last boyfriend down to New Orleans in his leveraged semi after he knocked her up, saddling us with this squalling bundle of white.
   
In the Land Between the Valley and the Hills, What Men Said, They Meant (online, Hobart, July 2009)
  Before the blue was sailed by Columbus and his greedy, maritime ilk, before the men who followed him brought plagues, monotheism and gunpowder, there dwelt in the Piedmont a small band of itinerant tribesmen whose only wealth was the richness of their language.
   
The Food Speakers (Issue 8 of Alimentum, Summer 2009)
  Available for purchase here.
   
A Small Important Moment at the Corner of Hollywood and Fairfax (online, 751 Magazine, May 2009)
  The girl being led across the street by her boyfriend works at the Whole Foods on Sunset at the deli counter. She's maybe five foot one. In heels. Although I doubt she's ever worn heels. One hundred and eighty pounds, maybe one ninety, she's slow. Developmentally delayed. Hell, whatever you want to call it.  But she's nice.  Friendly.
Possessions (online, Paper Street, May 2009)
  In the dream, it's Marley's last concert. September 1980. The crush and swirl of Pittsburgh's Stanley Theatre—the millworkers, the waitresses, the stockboys, the slick-haired lawyers—all have come to their feet and swing hands through the air beckoning for the encore, cheers cajoling the great, ailing man back onto the wide plank stage. Forty, maybe fifty rows back, the people who surround you are unfamiliar. You bob and weave like a boxer ducking trouble trying to keep your gaze fixed on Marley's penduluming dreads as he moves between stacks of speakers, musicians whose names you don't know.
   
Quitting with Jimmy (New Delta Review, Winter 2009)
  Available for purchase here.
   
Four Ways of Looking at Nashville (Kudzu, Spring 2009)
  Coming up hard on the crumbling outskirts of a tiny, down-at-heel paper mill town in the hill country of rural Tennessee, Sharon had been molested repeatedly over a period of years by a father whose disappointment in life was so vast it took hold in terrible, unrelenting ways, warping him until he developed the regrettable ability to justify and act on impulses that under better circumstances he would have found despicable.
   
Fable of the Deconstruction #473: Jameson on Polish Hill (online, Snow Monkey, March 2009)
  During a 1978 research trip to Pittsburgh's Polish Hill to interview working class males between the ages of twenty and forty-five about transitioning to service sector jobs, renowned cultural theorist Fredric Jameson finds himself in no small amount of trouble. Strolling the network of sidewalks off Carnegie Avenue, their macadam splintering like ice, Jameson has gotten himself involved in a heated discussion with Bruiser Stopko.
   
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Your Cousin Who's in Prison (Issue #2 of Weave Magazine, May 2009)
  Available for purchase here.
   
Color Scheme (online, 5_TROPE, February 2009)
  Think pink!

Imagine a world in which everything is the glowing blush of a white man's sunburned pate. From the roller skates to the window panes to the cassocks of the lonely, self-righteous priests. Every car, McMansion and office park, all that confronts you—every shard—insulation pink, pink panther pink. Labial pink.
   
In Order to Live (online, DOGZPLOT, February 2009)
  During a lull, my writing class talks about the upcoming Christmas holidays, the presents, the dinners, the visits home. I describe my discovering Santa Claus wasn’t real the Christmas Eve my parents got loaded and made me fetch all the presents from the upstairs hall closet behind the rollaway bed and cart them down the stairs myself, shove them under the Douglas Fir next to the small ceramic nativity set shrouded in slivers of white cellophane.
   
A User's Guide to Bringing My Ex-Girlfriend Shelley to Orgasm (online, Pindeldyboz, November 2008)
  1. Get a job.  Preferably not one at the lumber mill or with the fire department in a small town in rural Oregon where you'll learn from men who haven't been laid in years to refer to the great majority of women as broads or twats even when they're standing around listening to you say this.  Of course, any form of employment, no matter how marginal or temporary, is more effective than simply sitting at home on your ass watching reruns of Bass Master Challenge on cable and slugging down Evan Williams with a lemonade back.
   
Ice Water, Here on Earth (Pittsburgh City Paper, September 25, 2008)
  On Fridays, the Muslim women wept. Lavish tears in the swirling shapes of black abayas, these plunging arabesques of sadness and want fell to the dry earth and saturated the empty clay streets of Damascus.

On Saturdays, the Jewish women took their turn, expelling their doubt and regret in aqueous beads one after the next, puddling the ancient avenues from St. Paul's to Saladin's Tomb.
   
Jesus in 42 (online, Failbetter.com, June 2008)
  Jesus Christ rides the Somerset Avenue streetcar into Windber, Pennsylvania, in the middle of the afternoon. It's early June, but a cool front stalled off the Great Lakes drives a stiff, ceaseless breeze keeping the temperature in the low 60s.  This doesn't bother Jesus.  In his grimy pit jacket, heavy denim pants and polystyrene kneepads, he is already prepared for a long night shoveling in the cold and damp underground.
   
He Needs Your Help! (online, TPQ Online, January 2008)
  At the end of my non-biodegradable rope with various quarters' distaste for my shaky consumer ethics, I hereby vow to scrub my act cleaner than the exhaust from Ed Begley Jr.'s electric car—and I'm turning to you, esteemed readers of this high quality web publication, for support. When it comes to making morally sound product choices, you, dear reader, can "do good" by helping me do better.
   
The Devil Has All the Best Tunes (online, LauraHird.com, Winter/Spring 2008)
  So I’m eleven years old and there are three of us camping out. Elbows and knees bulge the orange canvas triangle of a cast-off scouting tent pitched crookedly in my friend Louie’s backyard. Along with the double D cell flashlight, which we will take turns through the night positioning as an oversized penis, we’ve also snuck in a sizeable transistor radio.
   
Shooting Elvis (Issue 28 of The Worcester Review, 2007)
  Available for purchase here.
   
Cleanliness (online, StoryGlossia, December 2007)
  I come home to the smell of meat. Not the subtle wafting of sirloin tips or pounded cutlets sautéing as a prelude to being served with thick sticks of asparagus, but the concentrated odor of raw meat—pungent, sweet, overpowering—as if our front door led to the killing room of an abattoir. 
   
If I Could Only Tell You One Story (Caketrain 05, November 2007)
  One crisp fall afternoon near the beginning of October when the autumn leaves shone like a bouquet of golden chalices lit through roseglass cathedral windows, my mother did a little dance, a jig or a reel perhaps, before launching herself from the observation deck of a mid-rise building in Albany, New York.
   
Shopping (online, GHOTI, Issue 12, November 2007)
  “On average every newly-conceived human bears more than 300 mutations—most of them detrimental, although to varying degrees.” Outside Magazine, January 2007

Her throat loose-skinned and pale, rounded by a necklace of living snakes—diamondbacks, the patinas of their hourglasses fluorescing under the humming lights and vipers, mouths agog, venom dripping—the widow rushes into Galleries Lafayette.
   
Kampala 2012 (online, Contrary Magazine, Autumn 2007)
  Black boys with skin the color of shoe polish cradling automatic weapons that gleam in the sun crowd the marketplace near the airport where the big jets still land. Their guns, it is said, carry bullets laved with the blood of radioactive animals poached out on the Kenyan border near one of the impact craters. 
   
Four Hard Facts About Water (online, Vestal Review, July 2007 (nominated for a Pushcart Prize))
  1. Mixed with Dewar's White Label whiskey and served in a highball glass with shaved ice, it will cost nearly eleven dollars, on average, in most bars within two blocks of New York City's Houston Street.
   
Breakfast at Bethany's (online, 63 Channels, June/July 2007)
  You are at Bethany’s. Again.

You have promised yourself, over and over, that you would not end up here. In the morning. Like this.
   
Victory (online, Brilliant! Quarterly, June 2007)
  - for Dominic Dunne

Once upon a time, an unsuccessful writer followed well-known editors everywhere. Elevators. Taxi cabs. Even to the bathroom. Finally, after weeks of careful planning, the unsuccessful writer cornered his quarry one afternoon in the stairwell of a parking garage on Lexington Avenue.
   
Oooops! (55 Word Stories online journal, May 2007)
  A filched bottle of red wine slips from under Ed's night watchman sweater as he steals from the firm's kitchen toward the elevator, exploding in a streaky, purple Jackson Pollock across the freshly polished marble floor and "fuck!" now he's going to be kissing the ass of the goddamn janitor or yet another good job goodbye.
   
Another Night With Jim (online, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, April 2007)
  Tonight, you're working again with Jim, and that's something about which it's hard to be happy. It's not so much his reactionary politics or that he's often late to the mid-rise office building where you both work as janitors. It's not even that Jim occasionally forgets to swirl the toxic bleaching chemical in an alarming number of urinals, forcing Berthound, your imperious Albanian boss, to demand that you take up the slack.
   
Showing Walter's House (online, 3711 Atlantic, April 2007)
  Lookie-loo's or ready-to-buy's with checkbook in hand, the first thing any of them want to see—if they're in possession of all the facts—is never the fenced-in yard or the new Sub-Zero appliances in the freshly tiled kitchen or even the small stainless steel accented deck with a view of the harbor that juts out from the master suite. 
   
Ten Important Facts About Fire (online, flashquake, Spring 2007)
  1. Fire is often used as a metaphor—generally suggesting creativity, passion and occasionally, insanity.

2. Fire consumes irrevocably what it burns.
   
The Fungible Trajectories of Carol (online, Word Riot, 2007)
  In her late 30s and attractive, Carol uses sex.

Belonging to fifteen Internet dating sites and employing more than 25 screen names, she has been meeting for sex with as many as six different men—sometimes two before lunch—each day. Missionary, girl-on-top, doggie, Carol is ambivalent.
   
That's a Code 60, Dispatch (online, Mud Luscious, 2007)
  You can’t, in all good conscience, say you’re surprised to find Chuck Palahniuk shaking a naked, upside-down hooker in an attempt to rattle free a stolen gram of cocaine. You’re also not shocked this is occurring at a book signing in a crowded mall outside Indianapolis. Nor are you astonished, not really, that he is shouting, “Give back my stash, you lowlife slit!”
   
Fall Line (online, The Aroostook Review, Summer 2006)
  When Erin calls me from Telluride, she talks about the high country, the 13,000-foot peaks beautiful enough to break your heart. She describes the ponderosa pines and the aspens and the way the snow gleams like sugar above the tree line. As she talks, I listen to the rhythm of her words, the timbre of her voice, the way the unfamiliar verbiage seems to stick on her tongue like snowflakes. Mostly though, I take small, quiet hits on the joint I lit here in Los Angeles before the phone rang.