There was once a girl who’d text a boy: I caught a dream on my way home last night. And the boy would text the girl: I can’t wait to see it. The girl would see an orange butterfly with clusters of green and gold. She’d text the boy her recollection, translated...
I wear my dead sister’s lipstick around the house like Grandma told me to. It leaves my lips dry and the shade doesn’t suit me, it’s purple and dark and velvety, against her golden-brown skin luminous and edgy. On me it looks tired. Most things do. But I wear it...
Suburban Flight In her bedroom, she places her voice in the music box given to her at a young age by a family friend, a groom she had been offered to in marriage, twenty years her senior, who will die in his sleep tonight with a chicken bone wedged in his...
Our father knows all about fishing, but he doesn’t do it anymore. He doesn’t do a lot of things anymore. He used to be real good. About once a year when we were young, he used to drive his old red station wagon all the way down to Kentucky to fish in a competition....
May 18, 1973 Sedan, New Mexico Smoke hugs the flare of Momma’s nostrils. “Why don’t you ever follow the rules?” The last ember of her Virginia Slim glows stubborn, even after she’s ground it into the ashtray. I sit criss-cross on the floor, hold my breath against the...
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...
Prisms In my MFA workshops, sometimes, when something felt clunky or not-quite-right, someone would say, “is this just a device?” and my first thought would be: everything is a device. Life is a device. The key is hiding it. When writing, we have to use tricks without...
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’m in Flamineo’s trailer when we hear the ringmaster yelling that the fire-eater left to marry his high school sweetheart. We’re in bed, pretending I’m a stranger in the audience and Flamineo’s guessing my name. The ringmaster must knock three times...
The sugar beet factory across the street from my house exploded when I was eight. It flamed out in a blue blaze of molasses that lifted cars a mile away. This was panhandle Nebraska and such events were extraordinary: seven silos down, the eighth held erect by the...
You stuff chunks of a frozen bird into your pockets. Outside, the world is spinning. A homeless man asks you for some change, so you hand him a headless bird. He holds it like a broken child. With the bird parts stuffed into your pockets, it almost feels like flying....