The Wayward Irregular

The first time I saw Carl was in his fourth week of life, a tiny English Bulldog with paws the size of caramels and a head too fat to squeeze through the bars of the baby crib he struggled to escape. The last time I saw Carl was ten years later on Christmas Eve, when […]

People, other humans, they’ve damn near ruined everything. Fox hunting, hard narcotics for a head cold, and the Ecto Cooler—the great things in life are slowly phasing out from our day-to-day, usually an order from some Fresca drinking slick-shaven-sally in a grey suit, something about safety or child labor laws. I’d come close, as I […]

Hello again, savages, Mikayla here. Matthew’s been busy getting ready for the second Tincture book to begin (June 3rd – tincturestory.com), so he’s been super lazy here at the Irregular. To showcase this, the following is an excerpt from that book of essays he wrote back in 2011, you know, the one he slapped together […]

An email loaded with amorphous detail rings out in the morning, and by the afternoon, we will taste human flesh for the first time. Sometimes jobs are like this. Email is the fodder for corporate anarchy, some press release about our jobs written in newspeak, vague on detail and ripe for the scuttlebutt. Everyone imagines […]

Matthew Norman thrust his bulk upon the device, and with a hot breath into its data port, he de-virginized my Kindle. Let me back up. He’s the author of Domestic Violets, a novel released back in 2011, the story of Tom Violet and his milquetoast existence out in some fictitious middle-middle class somewhere. I had […]

I had known it for years, but Christmas morning in 1993 cemented my presumptions: my parents were terrible liars. I believe I had spent the first few hours of the night in my bed, feigning sleep, but at least six or seven of them were spent on the toilet staring at my red digital watch, […]

They’ve made it legal out here in the Rockies to commune with the skunk, every one of us now buckling into the hand-basket and punching in for armageddon. We emerge from our homes in an astonished buzz, the future has finally arrived, and its rung in by hippies wearing tuxedo t-shirts, silently clinking wedding spoons […]

I held out my pillow case, and the old woman gripping a bag of “popcorn balls” demanded that I “show her a trick,” so I briefly considered kicking out her brittle knee and screaming “abracadabra” into her oversized hearing aid. This was not a time for nonsense. This was Halloween, and there was a simple […]

Salutations cadre, this is Mikayla, Matthew’s wife, and I’m addressing you savages so it sounds more important the next time you hear the deep caramel bass of my husband’s voice, or whatever. Last May, The Wayward Irregular introduced a short story series called Tincture, and it’s apparently resonated strongly with the five or six of […]

I’d asked the young man behind the automated scanning machine to repeat himself, and this was merely an effort to prevent TR, my companion, from absolving the man of his larynx with a roll of breath mint candies. “Young man,” I began, “the gentleman to my left is TR Schroder, my companion in manners such […]