Tag Archives: Mark Brazaitis

by | 10/09/2025 · 5:42 am

Everest

by Mark Brazaitis

It’s midnight at Camp Four. Our guide is leaving for the summit. The woman he impregnated—my wife—is too weak to go on. Her water broke thirty minutes ago. Our guide hoped she would be the first person to give birth at the peak of the world’s tallest mountain.

“You’re leaving us?” I shout at him as he heads off toward the Balcony. “You aren’t going to help with the birth?”

He turns to me. “I’m a guide, not a doctor.”

“You would’ve been happy to help if she was giving birth on the summit.”  Continue reading →

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by | 11/17/2022 · 6:56 am

Slow Fall

by Mark Brazaitis

He thought the end would come fast. Within seconds of leaping off the bridge, he would hit the dark water twelve stories below. But time was betraying him. He had leapt, but his descent had slowed to the pace of his depression, which had been gnawing at him for months. He was, it seemed, being granted a reprieve of sorts. Continue reading →

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by | 01/14/2021 · 5:02 am

The Blue Planet

by Mark Brazaitis

The first trouble was the boy.

Mike Little said he was lonely. He missed his parents and his brother. He missed his bedroom. He missed the café at the corner of the two busy streets where he used to meet his girlfriend after school. This was, of course, before she broke up with him. He was with us because she’d broken up with him, he confessed. He wanted to show her he didn’t need her—he wanted to show her he didn’t need her or the entire earth. Continue reading →

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by | 03/31/2016 · 10:42 am

Fantasy Fatherhood

by Mark Brazaitis

My marriage was a mistake. She was a nice girl, and she thought I was a nice boy. After a year and eight months, we decided to end things. No harm—well, some harm (I was unfaithful sixty-two days after our wedding and remained so)—no foul.

I was twenty-six-years-old and a bachelor again. Free. Or so I thought. What I didn’t count on was my ex-wife, three months after our divorce, telling me she was pregnant. Toward the end of our marriage, we’d made a certain mournful—and, as it happened, inadequately protected—love.

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by | 12/19/2013 · 11:40 am

A Carol of Mothers and Menorahs

by Mark Brazaitis

Becca Bishop missed her flight back to San Francisco and stayed in Pittsburgh, the last town on her Stealing Fire from the Sun tour, drinking merlot from a bottle she bought at a liquor store three blocks from her hotel at the edge of a neighborhood she knew she should have been terrified of. The next day, instead of boarding her flight to San Francisco (her bandmates were driving to California in a van), she rented a Ford Focus and soon found herself on the decrepit asphalt of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, heading toward Ohio and the town where she was born.

It was Christmas Eve. Continue reading →

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