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...
This is the third year that she has haunted me. She is pale and slightly shimmery, as if brushed with frost, but her cheeks are stained with the soft pink of little girls her age. She trails behind the other children as they jam their feet into snow boots and search...
The other moms at the beach are skinny and sharp, all oiled angles and monochromatic bikinis. Mira and I don’t speak to them much. “Beautiful day,” says the one under the striped umbrella. We cut close to her to reach the place where the sand turns wet and black....
After the war, a corkboard appears in the center of the village. No one knows how it got there. Only that there are several black pushpins puncturing the cork and a message for all the villagers to post their missing children. Weeks pass and none of the villagers...