Blonde girls at school seek to become blonder. Blonde girls arrive with new highlights, preening at the way their faces are framed by golden honey. Blonde girls say, “I put sun in,” and blonde girls ooh and ahh. Blonde girls coo and comfort when the results are less...
You’re good at selling words. Every morning you go to the market with the other girls and offer up a word or two to the man on the stall. By the time you leave you have a pocket full of money, enough to buy food to last a week for you and momma. Momma doesn’t like you...
“A Guide to Small Town Ghosts” is actually four linked micro-stories, each of which devises and fulfills its own narrative shape while overlapping with the others to create a macro-shape. Think of that carnival game that requires you to drop four metal disks so that...
Like a Grimms’ fairy tale transported to Japan, “A Too Small Room” proceeds through a world whose houses, forests, and marketplaces are elementary, even quintessential, but make up only half its substance, since the space in which it exists is built every bit as much...
The baker’s skin, burnished from the heat of very hot ovens, is soft but taut. The taxidermist likes to pretend when she’s fondling the baker that she’s fondling an hourglass. The hourglass. What determines the duration of all activities, provides a semblance of order...
Five of us dodge the storm in Tammy DeLuca’s bedroom, even Kevin, who stays dressed. One at a time, we lie back, spread-legged and flustered, approximating grit. Here, Tammy directs a ray of light between Maggie’s legs, is the birth canal. We see only skin and the...
over the parking lot of Aldi’s. They bustle to snag unattended shopping carts, return them to the carousel, accept the quarter deposit from the locking mechanism. They position themselves like athletes or secret service agents, waiting for an old blue-hair to leave...
I had been snow-drifting through December, on slow trains and delayed buses, ending each day with a long icy walk past other bodies, also losing grip. I could not get home that night, none of us could; Spaghetti Junction had filled with snow. We decided to camp at the...
That summer in Dallas my roommate Tina stole a Penthouse from her father’s stash. We wanted to see why Miss America surrendered her crown. Tina scoffed at the black and white photographs. Disgusting, she said. What sluts. I thought their bodies were tender and...
She will look tired. He will look bored. They will sit on the edge of their bed, close enough to indicate they are still married, far enough apart to indicate how it is going. They will have called you to their bedroom, which will be immediately weird. Your parents...