Jenean McBrearty

“No child is born angry, say the experts, but this is hope not fact,” Dr. Daprahana maintained. “Wrath resides in everyone at birth along with emotions like love and shame. Under the right circumstances, these emotion seeds can root in our consciousness and explode into actions, some deadly, some sublime, and some both at the same time.” Having heard metaphysical …

Geez Louise, I know what’s wrong with me. Even so, there are times when you must talk to something called a psychologist — in my case, for a lawsuit. (You know what they say about female litigants: nutty, slutty, or crooked.) And here I am sitting across from a woman who is probably crazier than I am. She’s scared of …

The second psychiatrist I spoke with was Dr. Knowit —Barbara Gowers, the first, committed suicide at 6:00 pm and I left at 5:45. With such a suggestive name, how could I not investigate his schtick? I had as many questions as I had nonsense answers for his. For this diagnostic session, I cleaned up well, according to my mother.   “Did …

What did Gary Hartnel expect for Pell Grant funded education, the classical intellectualism? For that he would have needed a passport and a time machine. No, these were the days of hurry-up and get a piece of paper and a job days. By 2005, however, learning Latin and Greek, or studying philosophy in the original German, was thought to be …

“There’s a French word for the expressions Manet paints on his models. Gayua’s anomie. There is no more moral constraint. And why not? The liberte, equalite and fraternite of 1793 has dissolved all social conventions into pulp. They’re now called pretentions. Modernists are all around us. Manet understood the exhaustion of life that has made us nothing more than stunned …

“Detective Earl Horsewhite, as I live and breathe, it is you!” Mona LaPiere, chanteuse extraordinaire, had been lounging in the San Angelo P.D. interrogation room for a half an hour, behaving as though she was pool-side at the Hilton. Earl had been observing her the entire time, memories of love and suffering fighting his professional judgment. She’d been exonerated of …

David McConnell didn’t realize how tense he’d been until the train left German soil and entered Austria. In a few hours he’d be in Vienna and he and Julia would shop for a cleric. He let out a sigh and looked up from his week-old edition of the London Times. Sitting across from him was a large man with a …

“Da-da, do-do, do-da-da.” That’s some good shit, man. You’re shittin’ me. It ain’t worth a shit. It’s all bull-shit. She’s just talkin’ shit. You don’t know shit from Shinola. No shit, Sherlock. Scared the shit out of me! I don’t give a shit. That’s some sorry-ass shit, all right. “Here’s the thing. It sounds low-class. It’s street talk. You’d never …

Phil called his penis “Pounder” because it was so heavy it bowed when it was hard. You might say it was Phil’s version of the L’arc de Triomphe. Anyway, after Maxine personally verified the nickname’s namesake, she spread the info all over Bonita. Soon Phil had rep n’ cred, not to be confused with crabs n’ stank, her info on …

“Why do people always die early?” Marshal Marquette wondered aloud as he and Armando St. Germain sped through the damp, steamy streets of Calais at six AM. “They don’t. They die at night and are discovered in the morning,” St. Germain said, trying to keep a cardboard tray of coffee mugs steady as Marquette took out his frustration on the …