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...
Sometimes I need it to be dark. That’s what I need. For it to be dark. I lean out my apartment window and pluck the midday sun like a plum from the sky. I hold it in my chapped palms, consider the swallow: the bob of my throat, the stone in my stomach, but no. I don’t...
Sometimes you think about her hands. Sometimes, before the sun hits the sky, you sit at the kitchen table, crimping empanadas with your brown, bony hands and wonder if hers are soft and thin, as white woman hands should be. Sometimes, when you knead the pasty white...
The creature who lives in the well makes noises at night. Small noises as if it doesn’t want to disturb us. It disturbs me. Right now, everything disturbs me: taking dishes out of the dishwasher, folding laundry, talking with Rebecca. “It could be a frog,”...
My brother is the smallest man in the world. I’m not even kidding. Most of the time, he lives in my jacket pocket. One kernel of popcorn will keep him going for weeks. It’s hot in there, in my jacket pocket, and hard to breathe, probably. But he needs so little air....
They came to town, one riding a lawnmower, the other carrying a leaf blower, their hair shorn tight and crisp like hedges. And their teeth: white, too white, so white they were blue. Flashed those teeth at everyone they passed as they wandered around our town. When...
The pigeon-pea, that lies under seventeen cardboard mattresses, grew in the stone age, amongst wild animals, and traveled across time and continents, and out of a store-bought box, as others poured into a clay pot to simmer as dahl on my fire, for me to feel it now....
She imagines you dead in the bathtub. The split second you slide under. The gasp. The sputter. She catches you, placing her hands around your tiny waist, your body like a slippery fish. She lifts you up and presses you to her chest. She imagines you dead as she walks...
Tonight, I make my return to the water. The weather is warm, the moon full, the time right again to take stock of all I’ve removed and dropped into the deep black lake behind my home. I wrote and sunk the first message a decade ago, now. Recorded my confession on...
Sixty minutes before she steps in front of a speeding van, she blenders bird seeds with berries for her vegan twelve-year old, who dirties their kitchen each Saturday for some type of raw bake-off, but cannot get up early enough on schooldays to mix her own shake. As...
That fall we spent our Saturdays deep in Amish country. We didn’t live there, but Becca’s boyfriend did, forty minutes from our McBurb near Reading. The farmhouse supposedly belonged to the boyfriend’s uncle, but I never saw an adult in all the times we were there –...
My uncle had a spotted pig, called Stripe. Which tells you a lot about my uncle. It started small but it got big, as pigs do. It was still small when my aunt left, sick of the smell of pig shit and the endless speculations on the weather. She packed her suitcases into...