I get to relive one day. That’s all. For me, a crash ended everything, but the full range of trauma runs through our circle. Every form of loss. An assault stole one woman’s child. For another, it was a cult. Disease. Suicide. Accidents. Plain old bad luck. There are...
Character and Expression class. Monday. A black box theater. The teacher clutches her cross pendant, “We must be looking above the characters. We must see things others can’t.” She paces the perimeter of the circle. “Come to class with a meaningful object and place it...
We bury Lil Fucker facing north in the frozen yard, halfway between the dogwood tree and the rusted tin shed, in the spot where he liked to shit. Daddy Lin tamps the dirt with the back of the shovel and hocks a pink gob onto the snow next to Lil Fucker’s fresh grave....
But not really. It’s a nickname, something my sister used to call me. You wouldn’t know my real name. He never did. I wasn’t the first one he killed. I wasn’t the last. Not quite. I was part of the long fade but not the final coda. He was shooting for 100. I was #94....
In the time that my mother has been missing, the skies have turned a gray, roiling mass. The radio is calling it the most violent typhoon to make landfall in thirty-two years. We’ve looked everywhere, and there’s nowhere else left except here, in the ruins of the...
Does Love exist? Is fat meat greasy? Cuz ain’t no way I could’ve fallen so hard, so fast, so far, by myself. Rewind that. I didn’t fall in love. Like Toni Morrison said, I rose in it. If only for one night. I levitated for that brother with the high-top fade, tired...
One day Neela will run inside and steal me away. The other wigs roll their eyes. They smell the hope on me—a sticky sweet decay like garbage abandoned in the sun. They believe in Second Girls, not fairy tales. They did not hear the story I did: how one of us (miracle...
The traveler isn’t lonely. The ghosts of dead oceans joined the ship soon after the first onion sprouted in the tin of soil the traveler built in their quarters. The ghosts of dead oceans tell the traveler things like, “That light is giving me a headache,” and “Is it...
I find my boyfriend’s car parked in front of the Hillside Motel and consider shattering the windows or, at least, peeing on the windshield. But that’s bad for business. Not my business because, technically, he’s my ex-boyfriend and, fortunately, it’s my grandmother’s...
Step into the Mexican restaurant together, you beautiful protagonists. Shake the drops off your umbrellas. Wouldn’t’ve guessed it from the Spanish-mission-style façade, but it’s a sprawling interior. Though it looks like you’re the only patrons there tonight. The...
Mei turns into a flower whenever we touch. Her pupils blossom into glossy hibiscuses—hues of red and peach and white. They grow from her pores and eat through her skin, treating her flesh as the soil that nourishes them. We tried different things: kissing, hugging,...
I’m giving Kayode Last-Name-Pending a pretty accomplished blowjob in the back of my rented Subaru when Jesus Christ returns. He’s a theatrical man (Jesus, I mean; Kayode, I met minutes ago at a bar), announcing the onset of rapture in a whirl of lightning and wind. No...