On the morning of her last day alive, Tía Reina awoke with a halo of bright pink aligning her forehead. “A fever,” she told us. “It will pass.” What she didn’t know then was that she had become a saint overnight (this we learned posthumously, after consulting a couple...
Every thought and prayer was answered. Everything reversed. The news crews packed their vans with cameras and microphones, and the people they were interviewing, some of them covered in blood, most of them elderly, floated back into the grocery store. The produce...
Sundance Lee draped his old snagging blanket around his shoulders. It hadn’t snagged anyone for many years. His legs were too skinny, and there was too much silver in his thin braids. Still, it was powwow season. He had plenty of opportunities. During the Grand Entry...
First it was the little porcelain dogs with green glass eyes. Each one in various uniforms. A policeman bulldog, a doctor poodle, a nurse greyhound. Over a hundred and twenty in the series. She got them all. They lined the shelf. Their glass eyes watched her husband...
And because the house was filled with comfortable things, you wondered. As your wife slept under the perfect thread count, you licked peanut butter off a steak knife. You thought about what it might feel like to be ripped apart by something you wanted. On the...
I didn’t have any theater experience, but when I saw the ad for background actors for a local play, I thought it sounded fun: wear a costume, stand in the back, get paid $60 a show. I heard they were taking whoever fit the costumes. The play, it turned out, was...
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,...
*inspired by the photo “Candy Cigarette” by Sally Mann* Icy blue stare and perpetual pout. Blonde hair like a mini-Brigette Bardot. She’d be trouble, that one. Just like her mother. I don’t think I ever saw that child smile the entire summer she’d come to stay with...
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...
On the school bus you should have seen them, monkeying around about wheels, bottles of non-alcoholic beers, Rock-Paper-Scissor, two kids having a shootout with six-piece revolvers, percussive wet claps from fingers squished between armpits, cheers, and...
Maybe I was twenty-one or so, somewhere around there, young anyway, and I don’t remember much about where this all took place, but our teacher sat on his desk and read us the magnificent one-sentence story “The Dinosaur” by Augusto Montessero of Guatemala, which goes:...