At some point, we’ll forget the rabbit’s name, how it came to die, the rush we were in to bury it, and when people ask, we’ll shrug, and Vince will snarl his upper lip in the way his body’s patterned to do since we went into care. But right now, we tip marbles and red...
There’s a beautiful beach. You get there by walking through a shady path, and then you’re on the soft sand. Some low hills far off, green and silver in the sun. There’s a couple on the beach. The woman on a towel with a hat to shade her eyes. The man in the water up...
I once fucked a guy in a redwood water tank. The kind that once held water caught from rain, maybe filled by the county every couple of months. The kind that now looks like a dorm room, a single bed pushed against rounded walls, a small fridge next to a tiny table and...
My face turns into my aunt’s face as I age. Now we know what she would have looked like at 35, 37, 40, 42. Lost in a gaze. Cigarette in hand, land of left-handed thoughts in her brain. Keep speaking while I rest a while in here, leaning back into the carseat of my...
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...