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...
When the birds go quiet, the girls stop walking. The air around them is glassy and pale, like a glass of milk their mother used to pour every morning: half milk, half water. When the birds go quiet, the girls can hear their own breathing: quick and light like cat paws...
It was the night Johnny came back to town, one of those pent-up summer nights when the sky trembled heavy with unshed moisture, weighing us down, the burden of it pressing us into the dust, and we wanted to scream let go! but heaven wouldn’t unleash that water, held...
You could think of it as an evolutionary advancement. Steelheads can spawn multiple times, whereas their salmon kin buck their way upstream only once. It’s a good thing: the average steelhead dad swims out to the big ocean for a couple of months, has a time of it,...