Before local news features a one-year-later interview with your mom and your aunt, both of them grey-haired, grey-faced, grey; and before the last flyer on the telephone pole by the cineplex disintegrates, leaving only a tack and half your smile and the fragment...
Two inmates have escaped from Angola but Ron’s father tells Ron’s wife not to worry, he keeps eighty-five loaded weapons right here in the house, so even if the convicts do head for Mobile, they’ll be safe. Eighty-five loaded weapons? Ron’s wife repeats, and she...
When your period comes, ask your father for Ibuprofen and a hot water bottle. When your first love leaves you for another or for drugs or for some other stupid reason, lie on the couch for three days mourning, but then get your ass up. Focus on your studies, but not...
I found a piece of myself in the dryer, shrunken from the heat yet muscular and sweaty. It was my dream of being an Olympic gymnast, and all the power that nailing a routine instilled in me until it tore like my Achilles tendon, sudden and painful. At the coffee shop,...
It’s selfish of me to request a haunting based on the small black-and-white photo of you in 1910, standing proudly in the ballroom with a lovely lady on your arm. Your hair is short, slicked down, and you wear a top hat and a sly smile. You look dapper, like Greta...
We first noticed an illustration missing, a golden finch gone from a 1956 field guide. Then another, then another. A quiet, methodical search revealed forty-two volumes, a total of 464 images missing. Many were rare, out of print, difficult to replace. Estimated cost:...
When no one was looking, we built planes in the backs of classrooms. We built them poorly, and they rarely flew. We rarely tried to send them airborne. Mostly, we wrote on them—notes penned deep into the wings or penciled along the sharp belly at the bottom. Discovery...
I watch my daughter ready herself for the funeral. She smears on white foundation and black lipstick, the way her friend taught her to. Every time that girl came over, they’d practice dolling each other up in lacy dresses and ghostly face paint. I don’t know if it’s...
The girl is not real. She’s known it for some time now. Since she learned that most little girls don’t practice their words and smiles in a mirror; don’t feel the tingling of the fluorescent lights; don’t linger on the edges, always watching, searching for the rules...
Dolly churns ewes’ milk until her palms blister red, fills her paper-lined pockets with soft and pliant butter, smuggles it out of the dairy before the rooster calls in dawn. Father doesn’t notice the loss. While he goes to market, she crawls through the knot at the...
Our father won’t want to die. But he is curious, and I will see it when he finds a seam while everyone is sleeping and slips through. Our father won’t want to die, but there will be the time we are all called at four am, Traumahawk having scraped him from the road,...
Come, come. Sit beside me on this rock; it’s much more comfortable than it looks. Listen to me: all I want is to listen to you. Tell me everything: how you worry about losing your job, how your boss doesn’t appreciate your good ideas, how you worry about...