We walk cautiously along the trail in leaden morning light, here for the spawning salmon and for a change. That’s how she said it on the phone last week, my daughter: I need a big fucking change of scenery. The forest is dank, decayed, ripe with torn-open fish carried...
The teenagers on the subway were giddy as they downed their Starbursts, shrieking and giggling, trading yellows, reds, and oranges. Reeya remembered those days of sugar highs and how they had whispered about who did what or did not do what. And how she and her sister...
I trace a line from the top of her forehead to the tip of her nose, a peachy pink so delicate it has the silken texture of a rose petal at the peak of its bloom. Her tiny lips pucker, and her fingers flex open, revealing a hand in its most miniature form, more doll...
Your best friend, Meg, is scared for you. She wants to accompany you to the lake, but you need to be alone, so you drive there and wander the aspen grove, leaves trembling in the light wind. You touch the smooth, greenish-white bark, the rough, eye-shaped branch...
The uranium bird has been picking seeds from my lawn. It’s easy to tell where it’s been; it leaves behind a trail of brown, wilted grass or shriveled tree leaves. It lives somewhere near the end of the road near the brook, I think. I’ve seen it there when I’ve been...
We were in search of eggs. White ones like the moon, and some as big as newborn puppies in the palm. Biking wasn’t smart because you’d miss the little things hiding in the weeds and bushes, placed out there for us wives to find. It was the daddies of our men who told...
Your perfume suffuses the hall, assaulting me before you do. Jo Malone Waterlily. You only wear it at night, a panther seducing a mate. Three days ago, I’d clocked the bottle on your vanity, drawn to its pale blue orb. Pressing my nose to the glass, I was 8000 miles...
A dream is a film happening while you watch. A boy running with a flowered pillowcase flying from his hand like a cape. Where did he get it? The boy in a space like a dog-trot— the open space between the two sides of a house. But this space between houses. The...
Still, nobody knows if it’s better to write about snow on a country road from an apartment in the middle of an urban sprawl, in a small cabin several miles away from the country road, or on the country road itself. Still, nobody knows if love can exist only in time,...
The first person I killed didn't run. I never knew his name, just his crime, so I called him One. "I didn't know I should run because I couldn't hear the rotor blades chop-chop-chopping," he said, sitting beside me on the porch—not the way I left him; the way I met...
In the small hours of the morning, I forage, taking care to nibble leaves both fibrous and tender, for the stories of a world are woven not only from what is young, what is hopeful, or what is easy. When the sun is high, and the air is thick and hot with blossoms, I...
The priest still has a mouth full of cake, crumbs stuck to his lips, when the mom presents a doll with clumps of hair missing, a book with crayon scribbled across the cover, a blanket still warm from the girl’s grip and says, “Bless them?” The girl cries for her...