More on: alcoholism

FRED, THEIR BETTA FISH, IS DEAD. Christopher tips scummy water into the wilted tomato on the fire escape and gazes at the red body in his hand. He thinks about tossing Fred into the alley for the neighbor’s tabby before Damien wakes up from his nap, but decides against it. Ruth always strolls up the…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

How I would like to believe in tenderness— —Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”   HOLY SEPULCHRE Mausoleum and Cemetery sits in a fenced green block on Ridgeland and 111th Street, five minutes south of my apartment. I pass that corner at least once a week, and when I pass it, I pass…

“I didn’t get in trouble whenever I drank, but whenever I got in trouble I was drinking,” says Wayne. We’re sitting together with ten inmates in folding chairs. I like Wayne, I like his thinking, I even like his God and his prayers. The herd of Morgan horses in his pasture comes alive with light…

GWEN LIVED IN LOS ANGELES and her brother Dan lived in Chicago. They sent each other spoof news reports, fake X-ray glasses, envelopes full of plastic ants. After the horrible-smelling flowers were delivered to her at work—“What is that, road kill?” asked her friend—Gwen gleefully bought a pound of chocolates, stuck her thumb through the bottom…