Nicole spins, smiles, bites Mark’s lip, and coaxes him from the circle. They make slow, cautious love on the pile of Gore-Tex coats in the den. RJ spins, slips Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from the shelf and reads aloud. He sobs and sobs and sobs. The room fills with...
Truth or dare: Who did you lose your virginity to? That sorta-kinda-boyfriend I had the summer before college. We both worked at Six Flags. He: the Texas Cyclone. Me: cotton candy. The days: sweaty, sticky. The nights: sweet licks of clove cigarettes that sparked 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...
When the boy’s mother told him to at last get dressed for the pool party, what he heard was: son, revel in yourself because everything in this life is permissible. Beyond the pool, he found the boys gathered around the air conditioner’s metal cage, handing each other...
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...
Find a pool of water. It should be still. Maybe in a hidden grove somewhere. Remember a person or thing is always itself and not something else. Now think about a glass. A flat piece of glass. Consider mercury, a type of silvering. Certain things do not have a...
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...
During the day I paint numbers on watch dials so they shine luminescent, but when the factory bell rings, I paint myself for you. My teeth, my eyelids, my nails. The circle of my drugstore compact reflects the glowing pieces of me, the mirror a door I could slip...
She wakes to a white-bellied blur, a frantic smudge of a bird looping the motel room. It jerks sideways like something hunting or hunted, bounces off the window and scrabbles at the mirror. Its wings pop so loudly, the sound ricocheting off the pressboard walls, that...