Eric Bennett's Page

I was speaking with God this morning when he started weeping. The pressure of answering everyone’s prayers is more than he can handle. Who can blame him?

I pour him a cup of coffee and we talk at my kitchen table.

Apparently, the sheer volume of prayers has reached the point he needs to prioritize. So, he jots down a few notes on a napkin: answer first the prayers of the devout then the wicked. Next, answer the prayers of the middle aged – the elderly and the young are, frankly, unrealistic.… Continue

She slumps asleep, raindrops on the windshield making streaming shadows on her face. The dash lights cast a marmalade glow and the lines on the road pass and pass and pass hypnotically. And in this way, we are snow-globed in my car.

The highway lights buzz by and by and by. I love their exquisite smears on the wet tarmac.

My secondhand, sky-blue Chevy is a shoe box diorama depicting the way twenty-first century twenty-somethings travel. Wadded Kleenex, empty Doritos bags, sloshing water bottle… Continue

You checked the box indicating your willingness to be an organ donor. So naturally they took your eyes, your kidneys, and your recently beating heart. You didn’t give up the ghost as much as they quickly took it away in coolers to various hospitals to various recipients.

They whisked you through dented metal swinging doors three days ago and the receptionist asked me to wait in the lobby – demanded that I wait in the lobby. Now that you’re gone, the receptionist asked me to leave the lobby – de… Continue

Tim goes indoors holding a feather in each hand warbling, "Look mom, I’m a bird." To which his mother snaps, "Stay outside; I don’t want bird shit on my carpet."

"I was just fooling, mom."

"Well, I’m not."

Pushing back the screen door, down paint thinning stairs, wedging through weathered fence rails and crossing thistled fields, Tim flies to the bronze cow-pond on old man Schuler’s property. Walking round the filthy watering hole, his feet leave shallow hollows, muddy… Continue