When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers. She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?” The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his...
I A cottonmouth swallows me when I am seven. It waits for me just outside my front door, stretched out along the walkway. When I step into the concrete space, it opens its mouth wide. Hemmed in by coquina walls and boxwood bushes, the only place to go is within the...
I look down at my phone and it says Baba and I realize I haven’t seen him since that time I was at home on the couch reading and my mom was sitting at the dining table on a chair cracking pine nuts one by one, gently placing them in her mouth and slightly biting down...
“You’re dead to me,” Cas says when I dart back inside the house and catch her dancing through the living room in her red string bikini. Cinnamon scents the room as she waitresses a plate of oatmeal cookies—hot, no raisins—and rotates for her boyfriend Earl, bending...
Willow doesn’t even get the satisfaction of saying Brandon broke up with her. They were never a couple, not officially, their relationship undefined after six months of perfunctory orgasm-less sex (for her at least). Her friends constantly pointed out she was way more...
My daughter, Chiara, turns five today. I get up when it’s still dark because, if I wait until after the Tuscan sun rises, it will be too hot to bake a cake. I pour myself cold coffee, then I close the windows and shutters to trap the fresh night air in the house. In...
Predict the next shape in the pattern. Here is a wolf’s heart. Here is a wooden crucifix. Here is an emerald. Here is one drop of water. Here is a witch’s crushed corpse shoed in jewels. Plunge your hand inside your head and withdraw a fist full of straw. Study the...
When I was a girl, a woman in my town died in suspicious circumstances. I still think about the day of the funeral; the spice of the incense as the priest swung the smoking thurible over the closed coffin; my mother’s black skirt, tight on me and the way she plucked...
Mother first told me the myth of the rabbit on the moon when I was still small enough to listen. How when the moon goddess, dressed in rags, begged the rabbit for food, it twitched, then threw its body into the fire at her feet. The goddess, grateful, drew the...
My parents buy my eyes and hair. The auctioneer’s small, doting assistant brings the parts over. My mother sniffs the hair and my father holds my bottled eyes close to his own. They had thirty years with me, but can any number ever be enough? A few tears fall. The...
For all that she wants, Janie knows Mr. Neilson will never kiss her. He conducts. When he conducts, his hair whips, his arms fly through the air. His moustache glistens. There are dark rings in his pits. Janie wants to be the kind of person whose devotion yields dark...
Marisol goes dancing on Fridays. She leaves at dusk, smelling of kiwi and tree branches, walking much taller in her black strappy pumps. She won’t come home until her heels blister. Later, she’ll say––These are my battle wounds, miren––as she shows us all that’s...