fbpx

micro

Coyote, Bones, Howl

Coyote, Bones, Howl

CoyoteThe house slept while I stayed up stretching, trying to fit my body into this world, knowingsomething ancient lives inside me and needs to ease into sleep. It worms its way through mybloodstream. A howl, released with a stretch to hide its strangeness. It is all...

read more
A Perfect Pair

A Perfect Pair

My husband has this idea to marry a laundromat and a bowling alley. “A perfect pair,” he says. “Like us.” He’s an idiot. Who’d want that? “Think about it. Now they wait for free, but we could clean up.” I roll my eyes. “Maybe some video games or an air hockey table...

read more
Boys in Boxes

Boys in Boxes

The men are dying. We’re the boys who see them. In tabloids, on news bulletins. Faces pocked with purple lesions, bodies ravaged by weight loss. Their abandoned eyes, their hollowed-out stares, hold us. We’re told it’s a plague of our own making. Our fathers—both Holy...

read more
Our Father

Our Father

There’s a photo of our father, donning a black suit, standing under a tree, with a mischievous smile and a diamond stud in his left ear. He was at a wedding, at a funeral, at a party, at a business meeting, outside a church, behind a courthouse, in another city, in...

read more
Secret to Marriage

Secret to Marriage

They sit in silence on the farmhouse porch. It’s nothing, he hopes.  Earlier as his wife lay sleeping, toes twitching, nightgown transparent from sweat, he’d turned away, denying her protracted slumber meant anything. He brushed teeth, brewed coffee, ignoring his...

read more
I Come From Aliens

I Come From Aliens

There’s a picture from my wedding where my father looks at me with his face all screwed up with concern and his hand scratching his head.  Forty years later, on the couch at the dementia ward where he now lives, and I visit, he gives me the same look. This time, I’ve...

read more
Neighborhood

Neighborhood

Occasionally I walk here, when the weather permits.   Today I spot a man watering his garden, a riot of grasses and Yarrow bushes colonized by bees, prairie flowers penned up with Zinnias. A tall and forbidding something with bulbous green knobs that attracts...

read more
One Night, the Moon Starts Crying

One Night, the Moon Starts Crying

Tears falling to earth in gulps of rain. No one knows why the moon is crying but everyone’s making a guess. Mr. Blake from the hardware store blames it on the fact that no one buys light bulbs anymore. “Got them LED things that never burn out, and soon,” Mr. Blake...

read more
You are pulling your hair again

You are pulling your hair again

and I don’t say anything as you drop each strand on the ground and I wonder are you okay do you need help is that good for you as I see patches spread across your head and I know that it’s not good for you, but it must be if you are still doing it even after everyone...

read more
Spin the Bottle

Spin the Bottle

Nicole spins, smiles, bites Mark’s lip, and coaxes him from the circle. They make slow, cautious love on the pile of Gore-Tex coats in the den. RJ spins, slips Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from the shelf and reads aloud. He sobs and sobs and sobs. The room fills with...

read more
Fiction Writing

Fiction Writing

Truth or dare: Who did you lose your virginity to? That sorta-kinda-boyfriend I had the summer before college. We both worked at Six Flags. He: the Texas Cyclone. Me: cotton candy. The days: sweaty, sticky. The nights: sweet licks of clove cigarettes that sparked in...

read more
A Pool Party in 1994

A Pool Party in 1994

When the boy’s mother told him to at last get dressed for the pool party, what he heard was: son, revel in yourself because everything in this life is permissible. Beyond the pool, he found the boys gathered around the air conditioner’s metal cage, handing each other...

read more