First it was the little porcelain dogs with green glass eyes. Each one in various uniforms. A policeman bulldog, a doctor poodle, a nurse greyhound. Over a hundred and twenty in the series. She got them all. They lined the shelf. Their glass eyes watched her husband...
And because the house was filled with comfortable things, you wondered. As your wife slept under the perfect thread count, you licked peanut butter off a steak knife. You thought about what it might feel like to be ripped apart by something you wanted. On the...
I didn’t have any theater experience, but when I saw the ad for background actors for a local play, I thought it sounded fun: wear a costume, stand in the back, get paid $60 a show. I heard they were taking whoever fit the costumes. The play, it turned out, was...
Step 1: Butter both sides of two pieces of bread. Put mayonnaise on the outside of both. The crows outside caw his arrival from their nest up the light pole. I can tell they’re talking to me because I’ve learned that even crows sound different when they talk to...
-after the paintings, The Baby (1944) and Artist's Daughter by the Sea (1943) by Milton Avery Why I chose to enter the world at a time of such violence and destruction, I will never know. But births always come after deaths; adults seem to forget this. It is only we,...
Dear Ginny, It’s the last night of September. This week, your leaves started to change—darkest green to richest red. Your growth this first year has been miraculous, even for you, my hardy twining vine. I remember planting you in the midnight hours on March 13th...
After dinner, after you have wiped down her highchair, the tray, the peeling surface of the kitchen table, after you have gotten down on your hands and knees and scraped the crumbs into your bare hands and tossed them into the trash, you button your daughter into her...
The cobweb-fine curtains blow in the wind, a storm gathers, the men work in the fields, the cat spits out its milk, and I knead, knead, knead the dough on the board, eight loaves already made, another proving, but still I knead, knead, knead the dough, my hair, tied...
*inspired by the photo “Candy Cigarette” by Sally Mann* Icy blue stare and perpetual pout. Blonde hair like a mini-Brigette Bardot. She’d be trouble, that one. Just like her mother. I don’t think I ever saw that child smile the entire summer she’d come to stay with...
The flock scattered across the river at the sight of him, and he watched, drooling—a bony shadow in the reeds—as the big rams shielded their wives and tiny lambs, as yearlings offered wobbling elders their strong shoulders. The wolf had not eaten in a month, but he...
Trigonometry was Michaela’s least favorite subject. Her teacher, Mrs. Parveen, was at the front of the room, giving trigonometric functions her all; but the whole thing made Michaela sick! Sine, cosine, tangent. More like shitty, cringey, trash. At least she came by...
After you left, a goat took up residence in the left ventricle of my heart. I didn’t know about my little stowaway at first. I thought I simply wished to say “no” more often and while screaming. I thought the quality of my enunciation had merely slipped the same way...