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,...
I have this dream: We’re back in the church of Santa Margherita de Cerchi. You’ve written a letter to Beatrice Portinari on a receipt for leather shoes—requesting our love last through this life and the next. Me, I don’t pray this way. I go down to the river, which...
Why not the boy from high school with the red hair and freckled skin? Classmates said he liked you, said he was too shy to ask you out, but you knew that wasn’t true. You knew because he was a Nice Boy, an Above You Boy who was friends with the Jock Boys and the Above...
Step 1: Butter both sides of two pieces of bread. Put mayonnaise on the outside of both. The crows outside caw his arrival from their nest up the light pole. I can tell they’re talking to me because I’ve learned that even crows sound different when they talk to...
-after the paintings, The Baby (1944) and Artist's Daughter by the Sea (1943) by Milton Avery Why I chose to enter the world at a time of such violence and destruction, I will never know. But births always come after deaths; adults seem to forget this. It is only we,...
Dear Ginny, It’s the last night of September. This week, your leaves started to change—darkest green to richest red. Your growth this first year has been miraculous, even for you, my hardy twining vine. I remember planting you in the midnight hours on March 13th...
For thirty-one of their thirty-two years together, Lydia and Meredith shared an evolving dumb joke which started one day in 1992 when Lydia came home from a rehearsal with a rash on her neck and claimed that she had Tennis Elbow. They would deliver increasingly...
When the war comes, I do not hear it. There are no planes overhead; It is civil, I am later told. I run through dry grass with other yard children, past creaking play structures, storm-gray walls, and an empty gas silo rusting in the arid field. I fall, clutching my...
If she'd been a regular girl like Janey, painting her nails whisper pink and talking with an affectation on the phone. Or an awkward girl like Amy, tending to elderly parents, holding down a job at the IGA while keeping straight A's. Or a weirdo like Naomi, even,...
You can probably imagine a husband-not-baby say he’s hungry, and the woman-his-wife Sienna hurry and scurry, her hands and fingers and wrists getting busy with kneads and whisks, mammaries leaking, while the baby-from-him sleeps, because Sienna must be efficient...