# Freddie goes missing overnight on a Sunday. That week is a blur of search parties and candlelight vigils, porch lights on in such abundance that the nights are as bright as day. We rake the cornfields in regiments of two dozen, flattening the farmland. Deputies...
That July, all our dreams were bones. T-rex bones, kneecap bones, bones larger than our house, bones of a dinosaur yet to be discovered that we’d name banopolis peelopolis so we could laugh when archeologists said it on the Discovery Channel. We were ravenous for...
The paper clips look like angels if you bend them a certain way. We wear them reverently or as reverently as seventh-grade girls can. Pinned to our collars, in remembrance of the popular boy who died: Our tiny office-supply seraphim. Maggie was dating him for two...
In this future, my mistakes as a parent—the ones my friends told me not to beat myself up about—they make a difference. They’re the first divots of trauma in Melody’s soon-to-be-totaled-out soul. I can hold her attention for a few brief years with watercolors and pipe...
A new pair of underwear arrives in the mail on the 14th of every month. The subscription service delivers on their promise, and the hip-huggers, thongs, and French-cut briefs are as beautiful as they are comfortable. This month’s pair is very good. Bikini cut, pale...
I pick up stuff. Things others left behind. Scarves, mittens, dollar bills, pens, rings. And I cannot describe what it feels like to carry these things around. A month ago, in a crowded bus, I was standing behind a girl with a gym bag, and I noticed her deodorant...
Ma has a third thumb. It hangs from her pocket when she thinks no one’s looking, drags behind her as she bruises across the hardwood floor. When we were younger, meimei and I used to take turns unhooking it from her hand while she slept, then butterflying its joints...
I get to relive one day. That’s all. For me, a crash ended everything, but the full range of trauma runs through our circle. Every form of loss. An assault stole one woman’s child. For another, it was a cult. Disease. Suicide. Accidents. Plain old bad luck. There are...
Character and Expression class. Monday. A black box theater. The teacher clutches her cross pendant, “We must be looking above the characters. We must see things others can’t.” She paces the perimeter of the circle. “Come to class with a meaningful object and place it...
We bury Lil Fucker facing north in the frozen yard, halfway between the dogwood tree and the rusted tin shed, in the spot where he liked to shit. Daddy Lin tamps the dirt with the back of the shovel and hocks a pink gob onto the snow next to Lil Fucker’s fresh grave....
But not really. It’s a nickname, something my sister used to call me. You wouldn’t know my real name. He never did. I wasn’t the first one he killed. I wasn’t the last. Not quite. I was part of the long fade but not the final coda. He was shooting for 100. I was #94....
In the time that my mother has been missing, the skies have turned a gray, roiling mass. The radio is calling it the most violent typhoon to make landfall in thirty-two years. We’ve looked everywhere, and there’s nowhere else left except here, in the ruins of the...