We wait until the soft explosions above deaden to absolute silence—not the kind of silence that listens but the kind that sleeps, and teenage girls know the difference. We wait until our murmurs turn to whispers and even the whispers seem loud—muffled collisions,...
In her old age, the Virgin Mary moves to your town in the North Carolina backwoods, buys a fixer-upper and takes walks on the side of the freeway. As she walks, she hums — a song by Lennon, or Handel’s Messiah. Or something else. A lullaby with a name you can’t...
I did not combine melted butter and eggs in the medium mixing bowl or beat the mixture with the hand blender. Did not add organic flour and sugar, breaking the lumps with my fingers before whisking the contents together. Did not transfer the batter into a greased...
When they ask the hero how big the bomb is, he says “Big enough to blow a hole in the world,” and we know we’re done for. It was a normal day. We were going to work. We were going to visit the grandkids. We wear toolbelts and have a wife. We are the working-class...
You were 48 hours old when I called the midwife and told her that my uterus was falling out, hanging on by a thread. “That’s simply not possible,” she said, far too cool. I told her I was splayed on the bed, naked, holding a hand mirror, and nothing down there looked...
wears a killer whale’s tooth like a toe tag and populates every available margin with sketches of the sea Oreos. Clara and I don’t sit near her because her acrylics alone look “responsible for an obituary” (Clara’s assessment) and we don’t want to “become a hashtag”...
Sister Francis’ long black coat whipped behind her in the wind, clipping the heads off dying dandelions and scattering white fluff into the air behind her. Two by two she led us like a grim reaper with a yardstick across the soccer field and into the funeral home. The...
My son starts grinding his teeth in the Fall of 3rd grade. As he sleeps. The scraping, the pressure - I hear it through the thin walls of our shoebox in the Tenderloin. Our third apartment this year. He in the bedroom, me on the couch. It keeps me up all night. Just...
When the boys' father came to pick them up at their mother's and take them for the day, he was not driving his green Ford truck but a red Porche that could not have been his. "What do you think, boys?" His voice swelled with aggression and enthusiasm and...
At eight I was rich and powerful, controlled railroads and electric companies. A banker, I embezzled rainbows of cash that I flashed at the twins while our parents slept in. Let’s play restaurant, I’d say. Jacob, you’re the chef. I’ll be the customer who leaves a big...
The bloom of your skin as the river thickens around us. Constellations of algae exhale. We eat the fish that bob to the surface. Suffocated. The flesh tastes of mud and cumin. Our campfire flares in the night, a signal no one is close enough to answer. Three elements...
When Tía Amelia died, we ordered KFC. “Kentucky Fried Cruelty,” she used to call it, before biting into the flesh of a drumstick, brown breadcrumbs on her white teeth, fingertips slick. Red ink bleeding on paper bags scattered before us now outside her empty bedroom,...