(Content Note: Abuse) Static. Startle. Wait. Wait. You’re—wait. You? “—your grandfather always said it was okay to talk to yourself—” Yes. You. You are. You are floating. No, not floating—numb. No, not numb—nothing. You are nothing? No. Wait. “—to yourself as long as you don’t start answering—” Thinking hurts. “—You’d better show up before that […]
I don’t know what I need, but I need a lot of it. And this is an opportunity. The store wasn’t here yesterday. There was a complex of car dealerships abutting one of those sprawling Phoenix strip malls where spray mist over the pathways so shoppers don’t get heatstroke. But now, somehow, inserted between the […]
It was a nice enough cabin, if Zanna ignored the dead wasps. Their bodies were in the bedroom, all over the quilt and the floor, so she’d sleep in the living room until they ascertained whether there was a live wasp problem as well as a dead one. If she ignored the wasps, it was […]
I am dying of the war, though not in it. Such is the nature of wars. A person doesn’t have to die in battle to be killed by a war. A person doesn’t even have to be a soldier to die of one. Wars have always been slow killers as well as quick. The war […]
(Content Note for use of racist slur.) John Wood boarded the Gracie-Ella ahead of the crew. He carried his sea chest on his shoulder. In a satchel slung low on his hip were his tools and the three things most precious to him: a lock of his grandmother’s hair, a shaving from the first cabinet […]
The Mother that Made Me. Cold and wet and smacked with air. I scream until I feel a familiar heartbeat. Smell of milk, and beyond that, the smell of lavender. Blooming in fields that stretch to touch the horizon. Home. Safe. Warm. Warm like the burning sun in the burning sky. The New Boy Who […]
Everything started here: A broad plain of yellow grass, the stalks crushed and smeared with blood, and the sounds of dying men—yes, all men—sobbing and praying to the rusty pink sky. The high grass hid their forms and faces. They were bodiless voices, as if ghosts already, rising above the field like ashes to heaven. […]
Ordinary fathers lead ordinary lives. They go to work, they raise the kid, they open their homes for the weekly mahjong and meal that rotates from one family to the next in their circle of Chinese immigrants. When they text their daughters, the cell phone vibrates discreetly. If the phone is buried in a backpack, […]
After the memorial service, Phoebe Morris returned to the beachfront townhouse where her mother had lived for the last twenty years, and prepared to cope. There was nothing of Mother’s that she particularly wanted, but there were papers to sort and clothing to donate, and it was her responsibility. She was an only child, an […]
I found my dying boy curled up in a pile of straw wet with his blood. Seamus rolled over as I entered the barn, and I saw then that he’d chewed his fingers down to the first knuckle. I gasped. “I can taste my King in my wet,” he said, rocking forward, naming his lost […]