micro

You carry Grandma’s finger in a velvet purse. It’s your turn. Tess doesn’t have a chance of pocketing it now she’s wetting the bed again. Squeezing the smooth pelt, rolling your thumb over Grandma’s little bones, your breathing quells. In spelling tests, when big kids...

The flock scattered across the river at the sight of him, and he watched, drooling—a bony shadow in the reeds—as the big rams shielded their wives and tiny lambs, as yearlings offered wobbling elders their strong shoulders. The wolf had not eaten in a month, but he...

Trigonometry was Michaela’s least favorite subject. Her teacher, Mrs. Parveen, was at the front of the room, giving trigonometric functions her all; but the whole thing made Michaela sick! Sine, cosine, tangent. More like shitty, cringey, trash. At least she came by...

What you remember is how you had trouble believing it was Ohio, even southern Ohio, the way the river moved and swirled, rushing over rocks, and scuttling the overhanging brush clutching the bank, and the water legibly clear to the bottom in the shallower runs, grassy...

You ask me: What is the collective noun for a handful of spent cigars beneath the knotty, crooked oak in the parking lot outside the Dollar Store where you work, dark nubs nestled like easter eggs in the dewy grass, loops of paper bands snug around the ends, the...

The night your father and uncle guzzle a thirty-pack of Miller Lite and ride your glittery bike shirtless through the neighborhood, you punch through your screen and tumble into the mulch. You have no plan, no destination, just a vague ache that launches you out the...

We took BART and then a bus down University Avenue, me in my jeans and black pleather jacket, as soft as the surface of my tongue, which means not soft at all, and you in your leather skirt, zipper down the side seam. Every man’s eyes snagged on your torn fishnet...

but she is always multiplying, like a rabbit. In this version of the universe, Sally is only nine years old but she is always afraid, afraid of food poisoning, of losing her sense of smell, of screwdrivers that twist in the night. Evenings, she sits on her couch and...

The air raid sirens sounded and my brother Bruno scrambled, demanding to know where my basement was. I didn’t have a basement and informed Bruno it was the monthly test, that there was no attack, but Bruno started stacking canned goods, rifling through cupboards. I...

The swaddled newborn startles awake at a quarter to midnight. I plug his mouth with a powder blue pacifier bearing an elephant with a right ear so large it emerges stone soft, shaded blue, white sharply outlined. The eye drawn in a horseshoe shape makes it somehow...