I’m scratching my name in the pew with my car key. I’m daydreaming about what it would be like to have a robot arm. Or a robot heart. I’m sitting while the believers line up for communion. I’m not invited, which is fine. The only flesh I want in my mouth is yours. I...
The kitchen lightbulb shatters above our heads. The filament burns red and fizzles to nothing. It is an explosion from light to black. We breathe hard in the aftermath, check each other for broken glass and he says to me, I can’t be here anymore. # Chicago-Read is...
Sometimes the name they give you is all wrong. It's really just meant to be a simple, two-word phrase to let people talk about a particular shade. "Honey, do you prefer Autumn Sand or Copper Slate?" or "Can I get two gallons of Alpine Storm?" ...
I’ve always thought of flash fiction as conversations where each exchange reveals or obscures, builds layers, introduces intimacy, teaches, grows curiosity. “The Bitter Kind” authors Tara Lynn Masih and James Claffey take that conversational flash level to a more...
That morning, Ted began buffering. One minute, he was Ted, coffee cup in hand, talking animatedly about this thing he’d just heard on NPR. The next minute, he was a rainbow-colored pinwheel, spinning. I’d never taken Ted for a Mac guy, so I found that part odd. If...
in her bedroom like a secret, only we can hear it through the door. My big brother, Lou, took off with Ernesto, the boy with the neck tattoo of skull and bones, who picks up my brother in his Cadillac car, and they both will be gone for a week. I scatter the little...
What are your favorite things to write about? Those topics or items you can’t stop thinking about! Hmmm. Tough question. Animals, musicians, and skaters tend to show up pretty often. I suspect all three get at some kind of expression that’s external to words and...
Kat goes missing again, but not really. She’s where she usually is—passed out, pants on backward, in the Wawa parking lot. Because this is her third or fourth offense, the dean of students summons her parents who drive eight hours through a freak April snowstorm. This...
Walls Her nest is too tall by the time Molly realizes she can’t climb in. “I left my tools inside. Should I stop?” She asks her husband, who looks at the wall so hard the plaster cracks. “Put some of those plaster shards around the outside, honey? Like a fence, you...
As if covered in invisible glaze, her bread bakes pink. She buys new flour, new yeast, sends it into the oven a butter yellow moon. Still it comes out pink, a darker shade each time. "It must be the water here. We'll get filtered; don't eat it," her husband...
Their old landmarks are charred, the ashen sludge slips into her sandals. Find me at our pit, he’d said. Where you dig for fossils. He should be waiting for her, always the last to arrive. Pine cones crackle, the sap hums in creaks and snaps. Stumps hiccup out sparks....
1. When planning your garden, be aware that certain herbs are highly invasive, and may overwhelm a garden, choking other plants. Properly managed and carefully monitored, however, these herbs are both decorative and useful. In order to keep them from dominating more...