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Once upon a time, Bubbe Sara told Mitzi, as that’s how stories are done, there was a city called Prague. There’s still a Prague, not so different from how it is now but so long ago, nonetheless. ...

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The Amazing Mitzi’s hesitancy to use kabbalistic practice in flashy ways, in obvious fashions, in manners that might hold her to covenants she hadn’t the capacity to keep, was not a new thing in ...

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Using a bus inside Los Angeles as a means of transportation is about as efficacious as putting a note inside a bottle then hurling it into the Pacific Ocean is in terms of means of communication....

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“I healed,” Frank turned his right arm out toward me, parting through thick fur to show the marks that remained from the scientist’s rushed intravenous-port installation, pink skin underneath, kn...

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If you give all the secrets away, there’s no trick. No one shows for the next engagement, no one pays to see it. Even if they can’t work it themselves, they know how it was done and convince them...

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The problem with telling long-form stories is, to tell them well, they have to end. It’s easy to fall in love with characters, places and things, easy to want to know what happens on and on forev...

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There was blood, because of course there was, the scientist was attempting a transfusion from Frank straight into his own veins. There was the shock-non-shock that sasquatch blood looks exactly t...

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Once, there was a man whose world fell apart around him. Not knowing what to do with himself, he did as so many do, he went west, the direction of change. Good changes, bad changes, change either...

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Magic is not a trick, she told him, it is a promise. It isn’t about fooling someone else or fudging reality, it’s a pact that is made. “Both stage magic and actual magic,” she continued, “though ...

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“I’ve been wondering something,” I said as I swirled at my coffee’s dregs, “something kind of tangential to your story.” “Sure,” Frank said, “like I said, I’ve got all night.” “You’ve lived a ver...

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I mean, I’m hardly the first person to notice something fundamentally uncanny at the intersection of Sunset and Gower, the Gower Gulch strip mall or Denny’s there. To the spot where the actual ra...

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“So, if Mitzi was attracted to you but you’re not attracted to humans, why didn’t she ever, uh,” I tried to be delicate but some things can’t be put delicately, “fix that with her magics.” “What ...

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“You can’t argue a thing into being,” she said, “that’s not how magic works.” You can conjure a little through work and practice, you can gamble or bargain or negotiate with the higher or even th...

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One of the other upsides of Los Angeles, for all the bad things you can say about it, is the utter timelessness of living there. You can’t account for seasons in the way you can in other parts of...

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Not everything is awful about Los Angeles, I’m not saying that. I don’t want to say that. It’s just that every joy there has a dark side, the kind of deep shadows that can only be cast in the bla...

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There are few phrases with a stronger one-two of power and malleability in our English than “the end of the world”. It means so damned much to so many but also a different thing to nearly every p...

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“I hate those The Secret books,” she told Frank more than once, “the idea that magic’s simple as projecting intentions then getting whatever you want, such a childish and hungry and greedy way of...

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“You play any instruments?” Frank asked, deflecting back to me. “My brother,” I said, “brilliant guitarist, though he’s rusty. My dad is, was,” Frank and I both stumble on the line between what i...

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“So, why did you study us in two separate disciplines?” I asked Frank, trying to change the subject from my own flaws, foibles, folly. “How do you mean?” “I mean, you taught human music and human...

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“And then what happened?” I asked the sasquatch, as he stopped to listen to the distant sounds of people insulting each other in different dialects of Spanish, in the diner’s back-of-house. “That...

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Frank Yetti prefers to say that he is “seven feet tall” in American English, in local measurement vernacular, even though that’s not exactly true. If you put him in the cliché of a general practi...

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You’d figure a sasquatch wouldn’t have much to be afraid of in our world, even a small yeti like Frank. Six-foot-eleven would seem to ensure that, if nothing else, he would be the last busker in ...

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We kept coming back around to that lyric “it never rains in Southern California, it pours” which is true enough, both literally and metaphorically. In the places where there isn’t often rain, eve...

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Fascination almost always starts out as fear, a fear that is eventually overcome while that focus lingers on. It’s a feature that seems to come standard with any level of sentience, human, animal...

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“Ultimately, people only want stories if they can convince themselves they’re real,” the yeti said, as he set his coffee back on the saucer, “at least plausibly real. My people, yours, all people...

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