This little boy has forgotten how he was made. He is old enough to know he can’t ask his teddy bear, but he is still young enough to love that bear and believe that it can feel the same pain and joy that the boy does. This boy knows he can’t ask his mother because she...
Raising Rabbits Will These Elevator Doors Never Open Hope Aquatic Mammal Anchorite A Strange, Silent Relief My husband said, keep baking bread Self-Solemnization Burn It All Down Casual Pinch, 1992 Monday Bath Cuckoo Drapes Coexistence A Lovely Light Pelican Hold Fast...
The secret to sin is to do it in secret. We learned secrecy young—two girls taught to swallow our hunger—so we meet up at nightfall once the last lights have gone out. We walk down the roads, cursing this town full of coal-miners and farmers and churches, cursing the...
How pointlessly beautiful, a tree. How massive and calm and sometimes crushing and on fire. How a tree’s waving branches remind me of her hair that one afternoon, the breeze, the yellow shore. Everything so different and the same. How gentle, a tree. How full of knots...
Louis liked the name: Prospect Cemetery. As if its prescient eighteenth-century builders had known that one day college boys would come there to look for one-night boyfriends. Louis himself found no prospects in Prospect Cemetery. He tried but they didn’t find him...
No time left in Jackie’s thumbs. They died before the rest of her, dangled precious on jagged hipbones, in and out of false pockets. Useless. Amputation was out of the question. Her son moved in to lift cartons of milk, boxes of cereal, orthopedic pillows. Take out...
Children play on street corners until the lights grow dim and the stars are visible like pinpricks on a bulletin board. Dinner is an any-hour activity of bologna sandwiches and watered-down Kool-Aid. There’s no urgency for the children in getting home at a particular...
Once a week a truck driver drove down our street. Stuck to the sides of the semi were two television screens. Massive plasma bastards. The screens always promoted something new: shoes, video games, the dentist running for president, carrying wisdom teeth in a bag. The...
Today is my double mastectomy. Today is also my birthday. As he numbs me, the anesthesiologist wears a pink pointed hat, the string, thin as a Tuohy needle, stretched tight under his chin. Nurses patter around the room, prepping the procedure and blowing sound makers...
A baby grand piano appeared after Billie moved in with her son. Fourth-rate elegance. Plywood garbage. The stroke took away her walking bass. Billie couldn't trust her left hand to play the blues, even after two years of physical therapy. Drinking a glass of water was...
Demons cavort in the darkness of trees. Slender, knuckle-cracking things, whispering a wasp language. You stop your ears with moss, but the what-ifs and why-nots are siren voices. So you take scissors to your hair, swap florals for denim and Elvis for Iron Maiden,...
Womb Cat wants to paint her house fluorescent orange. Call it Crisis. Call it citrus combating scurvy. Cat doesn’t go outside much anymore. She orders in her groceries. She doesn’t answer the doorbell, and whenever the mailman walks onto her porch with another...