“Sit sideways,” the photographer says, “or you won’t fit.” Obediently, they turn, bare flesh sliding smoothly against the porcelain, and dangle foolish coltish legs over the side of the bath. “Look at me, not each other. Hats off your faces. Scoot closer. That’s right...
Last stop on the LL line. Subway platform outdoors, a track on each side. A green-lit bulb above each track. The bulb goes green on one track, then on the other, and the people race back and forth from one train to the other, spitting out curses. Up in the control...
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...
As she kills the flies, Gloria asks for mercy, then sprays an insecticide that sticks to the walls for weeks. Since her roommate is gone, her apartment is filthy, and the flies seem to regenerate in every corner of the ceiling and fly out of every pipe. Sometimes,...
We’re not allowed to leave the yard, even when the other kids are playing in the wooded triangle everyone calls the island right across the street because ticks, our mom says, cars, teenagers, glass, so we watch from the back gate, which is warped shut and too high to...
That story you’ll never tell is the house on the street in every Seventies horror movie you devoured in the blue fug of your best friend’s mother’s cigarette smoke. The story you cannot tell has shutters and a deck and a swinging For Sale sign. Do you carry a lot of...
Colors baked into a layer cake of rock. A hot and dry May in Arizona. We cannot drink enough water. Whiskey at night: our mouths like tiny deserts in the morning. Relentless sun on dirt, on sand, on what’s left of a river. We haven’t talked about it. The other woman...
Four murderers, one of them with horn-rimmed glasses. A steady flow of pushchair mothers who divert to left or right around the woman handing out homemade fliers. Boys who fold the proffered fliers into paper aeroplanes – one of which the flier lady’s husband catches...
The summer I babysat the Brady twins, their parents were on the brink of divorce. My parents were on the brink of divorce too, but at least I knew about it. Nobody had told the Brady twins that their world was about to splinter into a before and an after, but they...
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...