We had always been many-in-one, even before witch-woman Nnenka's curse made it flesh. Our mothers stood at different cooking fires, our fathers prayed to different ancestors, yet destiny pulled us together like scattered beads finding their way back to a single...
Between Abuela's mobile home and mine, a white sand path interweaves the moonlit scrub pine. Sometimes it is ribboned with the tracks of sidewinders, so we watch our step, especially near the Spanish bayonets beneath which they like to coil. If the snakes have any...
My dad sits on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner and announces he wants buried in Carhartt overalls. He's 82, retired from the mines, and too cheap to buy Carhartt while he's alive. "I hear they’re warm. Leave a clawhammer in the pocket." He pats his jeans. "If...
The television casts a garish parade of colors across your unlined brow. From the corner of the bar, you watch me, not the game, but drop your eyes when I meet your gaze. More mating whisper than mating call. Wesley, the sleepy-eyed bartender, spies my nearly-finished...
Your older sister is the amusement park at the end of the boardwalk, the one that’s been in the mayor’s family for a century and looks it; the one the mayor doesn’t maintain because the newer one, halfway down and closer to the big hotels, gets all the foot traffic...
Winter lay down fat in its white robe as if to die. The war was over, and he ached to get home after years of service in foreign parts. The villagers kept cramming his mouth with sausages and boiled cabbage and the grime of their fingers. They had made him their own....
In Low Bone Parish, the water don’t knock. It just rises. Quiet at first, like breath held too long. It slicks along the bayou’s edge, kisses porch steps, then swallows whole towns without a word. Folks call it a natural disaster. But the women on our street ...
I’m clean. I was clean five minutes ago. I scrubbed every inch of skin, washed my hair twice. Now I stand as the water streams over my body. The shower curtain is clear plastic. On the other side, standing before the mirror, Henry shoots the dope into his arm. I can't...
I’m at a wedding in the Languedoc. It’s the last weekend of September. I’m relieved the hot, cruel summer is almost over. There’s a woman on the table next to mine with bleached hair and a magenta mouth. She looks like an eighties rock star. I can’t take my eyes off...
In those days, we woke with bedheads and foggy eyes and boggy brains, comfy in our slept-in yoga pants as we headed to the kitchen to make our pot of coffee, our go-to prop for endless hours of video conferences with others, also at home, also in yoga pants they’d...
She takes the empty urinal bottle from the nightstand and sets it aside quietly in a corner of the room. It was there for him to use when he couldn’t make it to the bathroom. The floor creaks beneath her as she bends over to pick up the package of adult diapers she...
Jessy, at thirteen, was a serious birdwatcher and carefully cataloged his sightings. Junie, his best friend and three months his junior, fancied herself a trail interpreter. When they rode their bikes through the deep native woodlands just beyond their small town,...