Now that the Arctic isn't cold anymore, The Blob is awake and tearing through malls like a post-breakup trust fund baby. After it drinks the oceans dry, The Blob returns to North America. The 24-hour news cycle was made for this. On their websites, you can watch the...
For only seventy-seven dollars, the TV preacher promises God will grant me a miracle. He clasps his hands in prayer, gold rings glinting, while I clasp the telephone, punching the numbers from the TV screen that casts the room in a greenish glow. “There, there,” the...
I bury my dead in this garden. Over there, under the cabbage roses. They haunt me through the day. At night, they sleep in the shadow of a fig tree with branches as wide as an archangel’s wings. I used to sit there and knit the smallest of garments. I chose thin...
so I know you are eggs. Sunny side up, salmonella-scrambled, salsa-slathered, over-hard yellow-white discs fried in bacon grease until the edges curl like wispy brown lace. Your dad was the original egg man, eating five every day, insisting you ate at least three. One...
I used to tell people that my first kiss was on a December night, under a pine tree, when a boy I sort-of liked kissed me after a dance recital; but actually my first kiss was older, and with a woman. In this memory, I’m twelve (it’s seventh grade), and I wake up one...
We’re not allowed to leave the yard, even when the other kids are playing in the wooded triangle everyone calls the island right across the street because ticks, our mom says, cars, teenagers, glass, so we watch from the back gate, which is warped shut and too high to...
Colors baked into a layer cake of rock. A hot and dry May in Arizona. We cannot drink enough water. Whiskey at night: our mouths like tiny deserts in the morning. Relentless sun on dirt, on sand, on what’s left of a river. We haven’t talked about it. The other woman...
Four murderers, one of them with horn-rimmed glasses. A steady flow of pushchair mothers who divert to left or right around the woman handing out homemade fliers. Boys who fold the proffered fliers into paper aeroplanes – one of which the flier lady’s husband catches...
The other girls laugh when she struggles to stand up in the ditch, her mouth edged with dirt. She braces for another blow, but they let her scramble away, and she wonders if her shoulder blades poke strangely from her T-shirt, another mark against her. She runs home,...
The town scalper says he lost his eyes at the supermarket. Left them on a shelf in the toothpaste aisle, and when he came back, they were gone. I say maybe he wasn’t looking hard enough, and neither of us laugh. My sister keeps a jar of two brown eyes on a shelf in...
—finally, it is night and you wrench the bulb from the porch ceiling and all the moths plop to the floor and you traverse the rug of ripped wings and squashed thoraxes and the sounds of your boots pierce my chest but this time there is no blood and the pain I'm...
I laugh at your need to keep your knees covered, shorts too long, pants too short, colors muted and dark. At night, I unpeel you, uncovering hair grown along scars from childhood scrapes along coral, swirls in patterns of fronds, cerebellum, a reef of skin for me to...