Mom and I got really into the arcade claw machine one elementary school summer. Handful of tokens, a frappé from the neighboring cafe, ready. We aren't even coffee drinkers. Our eyes scan a sea of tightly packed yellow polyester lions with auburn manes. "哪個?" "That...
Mom flosses me every night with my limbs starfished across the kitchen counter and my head hanging off the edge. She kneels over me with a spool of minted thread and works the string between my teeth. She says nothing used to come out of there, just berry skins and...
When Mamá’s apron catches fire, my first reaction is to grab Mamá’s body and share the fire with her. Pimientos en nogada is a dish that people eat in México at weddings and important occasions. Mamá is set on making it on our special day since she wants to prove to...
We’re having lunch at the faux restaurant. My mom is eating her fish at a glacial pace, and I’ve moved on to dessert. Without warning, she reaches over, scoops up a forkful of my ice cream, and spreads it over her fish. Disgusting, I think, but I say nothing. Why?...
A shrimp’s heart is in its head. You used to say your heart was in your stomach when you couldn’t get out of bed all day. You won’t eat shrimp because your dead dad who you hated used them as bait when he took you catfishing as a kid. I found that out when I made...
The hole drinks the grass, the leaves, the twigs, and our favorite park bench. Insatiable. Thirsting. It then drinks the sidewalk where little kids and their mothers play games like ‘avoid the shark’ and ‘alphabet hop’. But children don’t play on the sidewalks...
When you start needing a place to scream, you try most of the rooms in the house. You start with the shower. At first, you take a weird pleasure in screaming behind the shower curtain. In college, you had a film major roommate, and the two of you would take over the...
Two-lane rural route to the boatyard, boondocks enough for hoedowns, cross-burnings, not that I knew much about either, except they happened, that’s all. Downtown Philly boy a little young for my age, I once asked the burly guy who ran the place (clean shaven, blue...
My sister turns her key in the lock and pushes. The door moves a handbreadth. Mum croaks from the living room. “Hang on—I’m coming.” She grunts as she bends to move the draught excluder guarding the door, and we are assailed by the familiar onslaught of lavender air...
They say she’ll do anything for a tenner. She’s fourteen. She lives in the trailer park across from the river. Sometimes in late spring when the ice goes out, the bridge closes to traffic and the school bus has to stop at the dirt lot of the Fish & Game so she can...
Maybe I was twenty-one or so, somewhere around there, young anyway, and I don’t remember much about where this all took place, but our teacher sat on his desk and read us the magnificent one-sentence story “The Dinosaur” by Augusto Montessero of Guatemala, which goes:...
The love story starts here. I am dreaming of Orlando Bloom when I’m awakened by an icy poke into my bare shoulder. It feels like a cold bony finger pressing deliberately into my flesh. Flurries swirl outside, bathing the room in a white glow. I catch my...