fbpx

micro

How to Make a Mirror

How to Make a Mirror

Find a pool of water. It should be still. Maybe in a hidden grove somewhere. Remember a person or thing is always itself and not something else. Now think about a glass. A flat piece of glass. Consider mercury, a type of silvering. Certain things do not have a...

read more
Undark

Undark

During the day I paint numbers on watch dials so they shine luminescent, but when the factory bell rings, I paint myself for you. My teeth, my eyelids, my nails. The circle of my drugstore compact reflects the glowing pieces of me, the mirror a door I could slip...

read more
Blood-Related

Blood-Related

They spoke with such thick accents that she sometimes couldn’t understand them, her father’s distant parents, but she clearly heard the woman say, “It can’t be yours, not blood-related, not this loud little silly girl,” and so she tried her hardest to be quieter, and...

read more
Sixty, Fifty-Nine, Fifty-Eight

Sixty, Fifty-Nine, Fifty-Eight

On our first date, our only date, I lied to you when you asked me about my biggest fear. Sinkholes, I said. My therapist had suggested I cultivate a tangible one, something I could see and avoid rather than my fear of time, which was abstract and ubiquitous enough to...

read more
In the Path of Totality

In the Path of Totality

Our tiny mountain town became a city, at least for the day. Even I had a sign on the front door: “Don’t be a Daredevil! Protect your sight with eclipse glasses!” and a pile of them on the display case with all the best Magic The Gathering cards fanned out underneath....

read more
Tether

Tether

Next to me at the intersection stands a young boy, hands in jacket pockets, hair the brown of thebrittle leaves in the street gutter. Autumn. The anniversary of my younger sister’s accidentaldeath, by drowning—a riptide, no flotation device. I was nearby. The boy at...

read more
Familiar Talk

Familiar Talk

Mother Black Bear sits on her haunches under the heavy limbs of the crabapple tree in the backyard. She rubs her eyes, her long snout, and looks up at the stars and sighs as if she, too, has been awakened by the clock tick, tick, ticking. Through an open window we...

read more
Suit

Suit

A man with rusty brown hair, a beard, and a plaid shirt has been struggling with something in his mind, so he gets in his truck and drives fast until he gets to the top of a hill and guns it. He’s going all out, and where the cliff juts out over the water, he keeps...

read more
Looley Wants to See his Nose

Looley Wants to See his Nose

Not in the mirror. Not in between his uncle’s years-ago fingers. Not running all over town like Gogol. Just something he could hold in his hands for once in his life. He tried last month to see his heart. After so many years, he wanted to see the actual scars on it,...

read more
Stepmother, Not Mother, Mother

Stepmother, Not Mother, Mother

Stepmother locks Daughter in the basement, chain keeping her prisoner to the furnace. Daughter tries to reach the window where Mother might be, watching, waiting for a kiss. Mother is there until she isn’t. Until Stepmother pulls them apart. Until the policeman takes...

read more
School Days

School Days

They left the couch, a show about child prodigies gone insane in their twenties, and in her room he pulled loose her knotted drawstrings. Outside, snow. Frost clinging to power lines like cake piping, a blizzard fooling everyone and, for once, lingering. She breathed...

read more