Gretel wakes in the middle of the night with the kind of hunger that claws at your insides, as if it were a feral creature trying to get back to the woods. She hears Hansel’s soft breathing in the dark, the faint sound of jazz downstairs, and the distant, tremulous...
James was grieving the death of his father, who’d mistrusted Michaela. Too dark a horse, he’d warned. She’d be the one to break him. James had told Michaela this in bed, laughing, after a good and unhurried sexual encounter, the night their daughter was conceived. The...
We have nine snowmen in our front yard. One snow child. In the past month or two, I rolled, lifted, and balanced balls of snow for their snow bodies, searched for sturdy twigs. My wife peeled carrots, dumped raisins in a dish, ransacked closets for hats and...
I’m riding shotgun with our big grandma of a fridge sticking out the back. She’s sandwiched between the hatch and the rusted bumper, tied by the rope from my tire swing. I rub her smooth metal top where she held my cereal. We’re headed to the dump. It’s where Dad...
We stand in front of the cameras dressed in red, white, and blue. We clutch pocketbooks and pearls, pull the silk scarves woven loose through our arms around bare shoulders. We smile into the lens with an unwavering tenacity we hope convinces the rest of the world—and...
She finds the rosary tangled in the bottom drawer of his dresser, amid balled socks and a single cufflink shaped like a compass rose. The beads are wooden—olive pits carved smooth by generations of thumbs. The crucifix hangs crooked, silver worn thin at the corpus,...
The bird was wild with fear. Entangled in the fishing-rod line—wings awkwardly stretched, feet dangling mid-air—it leaped and bounced and swayed, a puppet on a string dancing a macabre pas de deux over the wordless song of the waves. More frightened than the bird, the...
The dumb bomb that dropped on my mother’s house did not explode. Instead, it flattened the dinner table and severed the left leg of my uncle. He had just finished eating a bowl of chè đậu trắng, my favourite dessert, when the roof caved in on them. It was not an...
What did the octopus know? Each day at work, when Alice fed it or cleaned its tank or gave it some item to keep it busy—a rubber dog toy, a teething ring—she wondered. She watched its eight roving arms moving around the enclosure, all independent from whatever was...
She arrived at the ragged edge of the sea with four canvas totes. One for herself, and three for the children. Each bag sang faintly when it shifted, as if full of seashells or bones. The townsfolk watched her climb toward the old house on the hill. They thought she...
I ask the boys to send me pictures, and then I build their faces. They show me family portraits in parlors, hair slicked from severe center partings, and military snapshots in uniforms brown and crisp as paper packages. They come into my shop, and I lay paint upon...
WHALEFALL Lorenza is honest in therapy about everything except the whales. She tells Dr. Adams a purgatory of bland truths: her hands shake, jelly seismic activity, when she walks outside and the world is small and real and people look at her with pupils that dilate...