We were tobacco wives before we were grandmothers. Massaging thousand pound tropical blades to get the most nicotine out. Our childhoods were indistinguishable from one another’s as if they came from a factory. We were Scout or Effie or Mags, until our Christian...
Issue Twenty Seven
Dinner at the Brady’s
The Brady Bunch are carnivorous,I know because I crawl into the TVand have dinner with them.Sometimes they invite my sister, too.Their sheep dog is also carnivorousAnd so is Alice, their cook.My Mom and Dad are vegetarian.They are orange vegetarian parentsAnd even our...
Passion Cake
Mary and Mary’s mother and Mary’s mother’s mother Esther lived way upstate in a pale brown one-story house half a mile behind the interstate. Bright white shutters and the front porch swept clean, wildflowers dayglow-green-stemmed and radiant with health lounged in...
Goodbye Mouths
I'm at a party in a large house with empty white walls and thick carpet the color of clotted blood. A tall stranger with hungry eyes and a slasher smile tries to pull me in for a kiss, but I push him away and he returns to his chair at an impossibly long table...
The Matchmaker
The sunlight filtered in through the gaps between the curtains. I straddled my husband and took a deep breath. His hands rested on my waist, that sleepy smile on his lips. Poor bastard, he thought we were going to have sex. I put my hands around his throat, gently...
Baggage
The woman I met that night at the bar later became my wife. Then a little over a year ago my ex- wife. That night we were drinking on the patio and she asked to bum a cigarette. She stayed after I lit it. You couldn’t smoke indoors. This was July. Heat sticking around...
1999
Britney is knocking. I lean my head against the door. Hey bitch, let me in, she says, I’m your god now, and I think yeah, that sounds about right. So I throw open the door like I’m ready to lead the parade. Before she takes even two steps, Mom appears out of nowhere...
Filling My Mother’s Hole
I hate my inattentive mother for having an affair while I'm navigating myself through raging hormones and a dumpster fire called middle school. And I am still dripping with fury after she picked me and my only friend, Sophie, up last week from school smelling of her...
What I Hope He Understands About OSHA Regulations Regarding Live Wires
a live wireyou called yourselfhome from Dublin for a dayhomemust seem a strange thought6,000 miles from what it wasmaybe nestled safely now in what it isI find myself missing youhaving never known your touchand you tell me there are no rulesabout who you can missso...
You Poor Thing
Miriam means bitter. My mother is as unknowable in this as she is in everything. And it was my mother, no doubt, who did the choosing, just as she did the everything: the dinner and the plunger and the vacuum and the pets and the children, my mother who surely rolled...