I watch her pocket two Snickers bars while I’m ringing up the guy who always buys a can of Skoal and a tallboy. His name is Billy. Nice guy, friendly. Works at the tire factory or the auto shop, I can’t remember which. He’s watching the girl, too, as she heads to the...
We put our seed in the ground and buried a body, but the land gave us nothing in return for the price we paid for it, for the weight of the earth that we piled onto someone who was our own. And after such a loss, what else did we expect? We wandered through our own...
In the bottom of Zadie’s purse, as she sits in a lightly upholstered chair at the DMV to get her license reinstated, everyone packed in side by side by side, Zadie number 23 with number 72 currently being served: A half-wrapped mint filched from the bowl on the...
Beatriz had been insisting since waking that we go to the house at the top of our road, on the rise above the sea. I was barely moving—even a four-year-old should sense something amiss when the full weight of her tugging on each of my limbs has not moved the hull of...
My father tells all three of us to write a eulogy and he’ll decide who gets to deliver theirs at our mother’s funeral in five days. Tom’s jaw sets, determined. Diane nods, eager to please. I narrow my eyes at Dad, resenting the competition he fuels between us, even as...
First: Make sure your patient is safe. Hope that you gave the appropriate caveats when you told them that this visit is confidential, and make sure they don’t have any plans to hurt themselves or others. If they’re a minor, you may have to call Child Protective...
There are six of them. No, seven. They cycle out of the tower and into the night, following their headmistress. Their headmistress wears a habit. The girls wear cloaks, cloaks to hide their hunger. I cannot tell you where they are going, but I’ll tell you this: they...
Transformation magic is easy. Gold into straw, carriages into pumpkins: the witch had done it a thousand times before. The man knew this. Or, perhaps more accurately, the pebble knows this. The pebble sits in her pocket. Its companions are a dirty, wadded up tissue...
When I meet her, I say all the wrong things first. Wind the beautiful. Hair is yours. Meet me nice. Name I have. All this to say: I will save the right things for last. I recognize her from the wanted posters in the city where we are no longer allowed to speak. She is...
On the morning of her last day alive, Tía Reina awoke with a halo of bright pink aligning her forehead. “A fever,” she told us. “It will pass.” What she didn’t know then was that she had become a saint overnight (this we learned posthumously, after consulting a couple...
The astronaut pushes a wire cart through the supermarket. Their body is obscured beneath the thick, radiation-proof fabric. Their face hides behind the mirrored shield opaque enough to block the sun. We decide to assume the astronaut is a she, for women make better...
1. The fourth-grade mothers learn that one of the fourth-grade girls, Jade, is missing. Their sons and daughters announce this at the dinner tables. The children are reluctant to provide the news. Nothing like this has happened before, and they don’t know how the...