“At first, you think it’s snowing.” This opening line of “Some of Your Favorite Things Aren’t Made to Last,” the first story in Laurie Marshall’s masterful flash collection, Proof of Life, sets the tone for an unexpected and wild, but, ultimately, very...
Fiction
Executive Assistants
The markets are bullish, Bloomberg reports at the crack of dawn. We’re the only ones awake at this time, and we know. We made the markets bullish. Our apartments are tiny. We tiptoe around, getting ready for work, so we don’t wake our fast asleep partners and fast...
Postcard to X
Just Alice and Willy and Ben now. Dragging our bones across the city, hitting every red light but nothing slows us down. We streel over to Old Calton Burial Ground and dance, weave joy in and out of the gravestones, crackle and spark and sing our throats to ash. Our...
A Machine-Learning Guide to Playing Dead
When an eight-year-old punches in the keywords first and love, play dead. Remind him of his mother’s milk, its sinewy aftertaste. Shower him with images of broken vases and heart-shaped balloons that pop to the touch like a zit. Show him an essay on the...
Countdown
10… My yearning could have deforested Maine; it continued for days, ever since I saw her, open-faced like the books on display in the museum gift shop. 9… I spent my days at the gift shop mulling over the dictionary. I glared at words I would never use. They sprawled...
Boston
Track 1In high school, we were masters of the one line song. Our greatest hit went like this: Another Saturday night 70’s loser,I myself and me, playing 45s on 33,wishing Ann would go crazy on me. Track 2As lyricists, we were uniquely qualified to recognize Boston's...
Jangles is Aware of the Dangers of the Clown Car
Jangles is not cramped. Clowns are pliable, fold together neat as origami. Noodles’ round red nose against his chest, Yurple’s giant shoe against his face, these feel right and holy as a lover’s embrace. The intermittent beeping of horns and tinkle of bells as clowns...
On Sunday
Presbyterian vegetarians saddle sea urchins and go for a roe. Wahoo yahoo holy water woo. Sushi sirens singsong seduction, spinach puffs are Jesus’ best wrapped gift. Crab rangoons goon naked crudités enticed by a slice of chanterelle mushroom toast. Devils ride...
The Annual Library Book Sale
The library was flooded with book donations. Mountains of cardboard boxes filled the basement, ferried from hatchback and truck-bed, down the elevator, to gather dust with their kin. Before they could be set on narrow tables at the annual book sale, the books needed...
How to Stop a Cough
See a doctor if your cough persists for more than seven days. Tell him you wake up three, four times a night coughing, though you’re not sure if it’s your cough or the urge to pee that awakens you. Joke about childbirth and urinary stress incontinence. Chuckle with...
Sorry Kid—
“Sorry Kid.” That’s what Carrie on Season 5 Episode 23 of Kids Baking Championship says to Kyle before she steals his cinnamon during a speed challenge. This ten year old has her own cream cheese frosting recipe and I can’t stop praying long enough to get off the...
Ash Darlings
During a commercial break I notice the six boxes in the corner of my room. They contain all the drafts of my third collection of unpublished stories, rose petal words, withered. I look out of the window at the cloudless night sky. So, it's time. I pile the boxes in...
Tagged
By two in the afternoon, we’d stolen four t-shirts, three baseball caps, and twelve packs of Spearmint gum, all while making friends with the cashiers—flirting if they were girls, talking sports if they were guys—and leaving each place with our pockets stuffed and the...
There is No Nature in the Courthouse
In the jury room, two landscapers talk loudly about ailing dogs and nitrous balloons. We have been sitting here two hours waiting for the selection process to begin. An old toilet runs in the adjacent room. Opaque windows block the July sun and any sign of life. There...
Six Minutes At 4 AM
I have six minutes left before the boy I used to know as a child comes out to skate the performance of his life. I go downstairs to make instant oatmeal and the water takes ages to boil. I compose a list of things you can do in six minutes – it might well not include...
The Hole in the Wall
“When your world abruptly falls apart, inaction is a powerful counteract,” said the voice, once leaving the man to his empty room.The man walked the empty room, pacing its area as though studying it. The man did so until he became fatigued, ultimately falling asleep....
An Evening With
I found Momma’s wig and green formal in her old trunk. She’d worn them to her last birthday party at DiFranco’s. After looking in the bathroom mirror, I imagined myself on a New York stage singing her favorite numbers. I performed “My Man” and voiced every word with...
The Narrow Path of Totality
When mom would get tipsy, she’d tell this story. She had only one; beautifully embellished, wild with gestures, impeccable timing, and heart dropping punchiness.“It was a brutal labour.” She’d look around the living room and declare “You guys couldn’t begin to...
What Binds
I become things. Today I become a staple stuck in a telephone pole, chewing its corner of paper. Tastes like missing puppy flier, honeyed with a crust of sadness. Not like the bitter root of ads for the neighborhood watch. Or the starchy invitation to a show by The...
Portraits of Fowl Women
~ Swans and geese hail from the same branch off the duck family. Over time, they, too, drifted apart. Lynne’s father said they could trace ancestors all the way back to the Mayflower. Fishermen and servants leaving an old land for a new land where they became...
Kokoschka’s doll
Sometimes Kokoschka tells me I don’t exist. He whispers, you’re a transitionary object, dear doll, an illusionary surface, an overpriced representation of absence, and he groans into the feathery folds in my thighs and throws me to the floor. I was wrapped in tissue...
Window Dolls
I see other girls like me, breathing their breath, their heads against the back seat windows, greasy imprints on the glass, their gaze on blurring buildings, boys on bikes, other cars. Chevy. Chrysler. Cutlass Supreme. We are behind our parents’ heads. For the moment,...
Archie and I. Alone. Together
Archie's coat smells of old man and cat pee. You like to dip your nose down the sagging collar and inhale the earthy scent in the playground line. Others pinch their sensitive noses and make noises that tighten his fish-hooked jaw and turn his ears pink, but you find...
There’s a cabin in the woods in your suburb
Taxidermied gimmicks on the inside, pretty little necklaces hanging from jackalope antlers, jewels like glass eyes. The corpse in the armchair, he’s very handsome. But the HOA must define “death” before you approach him so the body never leaves. Growing even more...
Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler
We are heat cranky, though we try not to be. We sit in this hot room, hot because it’s South Louisiana, hot because it’s summer, hot because the air conditioner broke down. My mother carries a tray of sweet, iced tea into the enclosed side porch, usually...
The Abandoned Hydrolic Maintenance of the Archipelago
The halo didn't work as scientists expected then, the crown of thorns did not pierce the star as intended, its insides did not spill out like a slit belly and dim its brightness.Awoken from its slumber, uncontained it reached octopus-like light tendrils around the...
Standing around the Hearts
In first period health class, all twenty of us stood around the cow’s heart Miss Hutchings unwrapped on her desk. “Inside and out,” she said, “we need to know ourselves,” halving that heart with a scalpel to show us auricles, ventricles, valves, and the wall...
Idea
The writer had an idea for a story and took out his spiral pad and pencil nub from inside his ear and began to write about the phone call he received from a late-night TV host who said he was referred to him, read his collections of flash fiction and would like to...
His Confession
He uncorks a 2017 bottle of Caymus Cabernet and pours out a story twice as old. Six words filter through. Six I want to unhear. Knife, nightArgument. Slashed, severedFled So many questions to ask once my thoughts unscramble, and stomach untwists. Only one makes it...
Undeveloped
Before I leave you, I clean out my desk drawers. I no longer want to hold onto these things: Mr. & Mrs. rubber address stamp, sushi erasers you bought me even though I dislike seafood, unopened ovulation tracker. A film cartridge, black and white Kodak, 35 mm....
Ballad of Him
He rented a room on F Street, three days a week washing dishes at a local restaurant. The building he was in was broken. Small rooms split into smaller rooms by cheap drywall.Her room was down the hall. Someone he realized he knew. After work he stood outside her...
Screaming Ourselves Horse
At first, the men didn’t understand. Sometimes the change would happen at midnight, and other times it’d sweep through at midday. They’d wake to a bed frozen over, or they’d frown upon entering the kitchen, finding lunch absent from the table. Within the house, at...
Like My Grandmother’s China
You would be so surprised, I know, to learn the real reason I stayed with you far too long. One brisk October day a decade ago, walking up the steep slope of Eugenia Street, we passed a house with well-tended planter boxes. You glanced at the fuchsia nestled there and...
Aloha
Shawn and Shauntelle showed up in comical drag at the Kauai Pride Picnic at Queen Surf Beach,one in a hula skirt and coconut bra, the other tucked into short shorts and squeezed into a paddedbustier. Diane and I met them the day before as Yin and Yang, what they...
Second Hand Roses
Early nineties, dumpster diving. The blackberry back alleys of Vancouver’s gay west village have the best loot. At first we climb up and lean in, poking around with a stick. After a few killer hauls, we wade in hip deep. We find anything and everything: cupcakes,...
What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk
We’ve been together most of your life. And, I have only one rule. An eighty-four year old widow, hands trembling and crying on her marital bed - remembering her ninth year on earth and the death of her mother in 1919. Too afraid and confused to say, They took turns...
After the reading
As a final gesture, he ate the poem, starting with the rhyming couplet at the beginning andworking his way through several slant rhymes and aporia, caesura, and some nice assonance. Hepaused at the final line, peering into a sea of faces, then dropped it to the floor....
Dolor
I am at my sister’s house the day after my grandma’s funeral and we sit side by side on her carpeted floor unspeaking. She did not cry at the church yesterday or on the day our father told us the bad news, and for some reason this bothers me. This is what I’m thinking...
YTD ROI
A live public art installation where college football stadium bleachers are set up for people who think no one uses public libraries anymore to attend and observe the hundreds and thousands of people walking in and out of libraries all day. Witnessing the library for...
How to Make a Ford Mondeo Fly
Motorway air pummels through the window. Far behind, sirens cry. If there’s a roadblock, I’ll blast right through, pick up Keeley and we’ll drive drive drive—daddy and daughter on the run. We’ll spend the evidence and pay in cash for service-station sundaes and trips...
Dice
Down by the Elbow, Billy’s place was, up high on the rock, so high it was a hardship to get from the dock to the cottage. All rock, gray granite with a stripe of pink quartz marbled by white. Wind-born waves shuffled against the shore, blue-tailed skinks sunned in...
Only a parched tongue knows how much it loves the taste of water
In a few days, is Ramila’s wedding but today she must do as her mother says. Don’t drink an ounce of what you fetch. Remember, water is your liquid dowry. She doesn’t. At the village well, she jostles in a queue of women, exhausted like heads crucified on poles. The...
The Birthers
He was the first one to bathe in your blood. The only one.It had stunned you, his reappearance, like a portrait unwrapping itself from a swirling mist. He'd promised to leave the premises if your back touched the floor of the suspended hut. He'd wrestled the alabe...
Educated
It is the last night of class. The students bring me gifts. Several bottles of gin, with the distinctive colored glass. These students came up with the answer that it’s my favorite kind. I keep watch on the window in the classroom door. I’m a nervous scholar, past and...
The Jesus Slots
Through the wall, and the whole night, I hear her shouting: ‘Jesus!’ and ‘Jesus Christ!’ and ‘Jesus!’ and more of the same shit until the morning comes creeping in.At breakfast, while the sun makes its way over the tiles in the kitchen, I tease her about it over our...
Calling
The crackle of her rabbiting breath over the phone. “Hello,” I say, like always. “Hello? Is anybody there?”“I’m not sure.” Her speech fraying at the hem. Her words leaking from a badly-sealed balloon. I try to guess which woes she needs me to uproot, if any:...
How To Build A Rocket
Rocket science is still rocket science, so make sure you know the specifics of the rocket you want to build. This has gotten easier because there is so much information out there. Not so much online, but libraries are free and open anytime, anywhere. You can take out...
Bones of Steel
Tomorrow, you will come for me, you will pry me open, rip out pipes, radiator, battery, pull off my steering wheel, pluck mirrors, yank windows, haul the best of my organs for sale, scatter the rest of my body parts in four corners of the country....
The Screamer
My girlfriend’s been soliciting money for sexual encounters with older men. Her friend showed me the messages: Hi, Robert – how can we please you? This friend was to possibly join the venture; that’s what she wanted anyway, but friend thought I was an alright guy,...
The Grease Ant
An army of ants swarms a left-out jar of peanut butter. In the fresh sun, they gleam like honey. I toss the jar over the fence into the vacant yard next door and smoosh the rest of them with a paper towel. Their transparent bodies curl into miniature yoga poses as...
Saw a Shooting Star
Sparked unusual-green. Spat twice, turned widdershins three times,as Manual decrees; letter ETA two days.Fingers crossed. ++If your eyes are crusty, pick at the edges of them. The sleep is done and dusted with, another day to face, another day to try to remember what...
Sister Story
Fifteen years ago, at a diner in Hammington, Wisconsin where I grew up, Angie bit the pickle her mother said I could have—Angie hated pickles—and placed it on the Formica-topped table in front of my plate. Angie is my younger half-sister. And even though she was...
It Helped and It Didn’t
I try to move my father but the weight of him stays immobile in the twin bed while my motherfusses over the pee stain on the carpet moaning about what will Father Flynn say should we callhim for the last rites when a man from downstairs who in the old days would be...
Egg Days
I crack an egg into a pan and think about this: Once an iron bar went through a man’s brain. I learned about this in school. The injury affected his frontal lobe only, the area responsible for personality. I drop the cracked shell onto a paper towel and think about...
Statue Thinks of Nothing but Murder All Day
after James Pradier’s “Sapho” A foreign businessman pinches the ass of the Sapho sculpture in Musee d'Orsay to impress his guest, and the statue has had enough. Her prominent placement at the front of the museum ensures this happens more than should be possible,...
Spaceman
The rumor afterward was that he overdosed on Klonopin and Tylenol PM. The only observer to his ascent was a YouTube video of cloudbursts showering dry plains heavy. After midnight he slipped the bond. The volume lifted, flooded his studio apartment’s atmosphere,...
She said He said
"Clean aisle nine before you leave," Michelle said."It is clean," Derek said."Tidy up, I mean," she said."I need to leave on time today," he said."I bet you do," she remarked."Why do you say that?" he wondered."Just go and tidy up," she exclaimed."I have a part in a...
Hard Shells Too Break With Heavy Blows
A hammer strikes against the shaven brown shell. Hard. Once again, precisely at the center. The thud, strong as the hammer itself, shakes her resolve. Not today, not now, maybe later. One fiery look from her husband, his clenched teeth tightening the sides of his face...
Stone Fruit
Technically everything produced from a flower is a fruit. Does that make her a mango? It would make sense if she were a drupe. He had given her flowers on their first date. Her face had felt accosted by the perfumy pungency. “I’m a statistician”, he’d said “but not...
Mistress #19
You aren’t positive you’re a couple until you find it hard to breathe. She sweeps in, magnificent in her mutability. You might have met her on the plane, attending that long-delayed concert or during your first trip back to the...
Circe at the Strip Club
She’s punching buttons on the strip joint jukebox when a voice pipes up behind her.“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you a witch?” The voice cracks just a little, then coughs tocover it up.She finishes making her selection: “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. Her friend Onyx is upnext,...
Kindling
I lived alone on an island in a Queen Ann Victorian that was always on fire. On the day I first moved in, the turret was already ablaze, puff, puff, puffing threads of dark smoke into the sky, like coded messages to a distant land. Some people might have balked at...
Through Thin Air
The first time Cade noticed his wife’s waning presence was the day after their sixth anniversary, which he had forgotten, again, despite multiple reminders on his calendar and his phone. He had been really busy at the hospital — there was a multicar crash around noon...
Cherry Paint
“DYKE” just like that, in big, bold, red letters on the side of my brand new, shiny white car. Dial tone in my ear as I wait to tell my grandma that I won’t be able to drive her to her cardiologist appointment today. Her voicemail is what I hear next. I can’t tell her...
Self-Checkout
Lee Carson is allergic to peanuts [1], and so he does not go down the aisle with the peanut butter at the local A&P. [1] Thirty years ago, Lee’s lips swelled after eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at a picnic in the park. His mother, wrapped in her...
How to Make Money in the Summertime
Be sixteen. Go down to the Shell gas station at the corner of Welch Road and Route 309 and talk to Con Salt while he’s working the pumps. Don’t ask Con any personal questions because he’ll keep you hanging down there all day. Ask Con if there’s any work going around...
The Passions of Saint Markella
Today Markella is in a flowered dress, the kind girls wear in the summer, with straps instead of sleeves and the sun burns her shoulders. The pattern on the dress is the same as the one on the house robes of most aunts: daisies so close together they leave tiny...
Becoming a Man
Point Pleasant, WV, 1965The boy’s classmates teased him because he still slept with his favorite stuffed animal, a spotted dog with droopy ears, even though he was now twelve. It began at Toby’s sleepover birthday party. It was only 8:30 when the boy called his father...
Hoarder’s Lament
Old woman, you swore / once / on a soiled couch beneath forgotten coats beneath black trash bags stuffed with someone/ that you could /else’s cast-offs, debris from other lives clogging the storm drains of her own,/ survive the world / a rising tide of newspapers,...
Refraction
Every other night, you hide the knives. You repeat “baby” and “honey” and “darling”, but he isn’t appeased. He kicks your shin. He curses. Spits. Yanks your hair and pushes you up against freezing, concrete walls. Accuses you of screwing some man in the apartment...
Abnormal, Illinois
Ted looked down. A few shreds of his brownish-gray hair had fallen to the linoleum tiles, in a kind of aura around the barber chair. He closed his eyes. The scissors made a regular snick as they worked around his right ear. He couldn't see what the young kid in the...
Michelle Ross’s They Kept Running, review by Dan Crawley
They Kept Running (University of North Texas Press, 2022) by Michelle Ross is the 2021 Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. As I read this gem of a book by one of my favorite writers, I was not surprised this collection of flash fictions...
Virtue Signals
I don't remember at which rally I met Brad. He always went to them alone, wearing the brightest pink pussyhat and a tight "Future is Female" t-shirt. He was fit but awkward and a women's rights superfan. Sometimes, I caught him talking to himself.He eventually found...
Oh, Predator, and Me
Alice slew me. I fell like the universe from the back of a pickup truck. Big, loud thud. Picked myself up, dusted off, tried to figure out how to make myself worthy of her appetite. She stood alone at the concert, hair pulled back, a fluffy scarf hiding the skin of...
The Bed
The bed was a normal bed until you laid down on it. The first time I did I thought I was having dreams, but I wasn’t. They glowed around me, these soldered shapes in the dark. At breakfast the next morning I asked my good friend, who was the owner of the bed, why the...
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...
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...
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...
With Regrets to the Roots
When the woman was still a woman, she kept a special place in her mind where she locked away all of the things which were too unkind to say. Every medical refutation to the woman at work who kept trying to sell her essential oils for her diabetes and her septicemia...
Scream
Kelsey heard it first. She shared this huge ancient wood frame house with her grandmother, her baby brother, and her cousin Joey. Many of her friends came up with excuses when asked to come over, she understood but would still be disappointed.But she heard it, the...
Moments of Reduction
The moon longs for the tree. To be entangled in its sinuous outreaching limbs. Like sleep twining night, labor pushing out cacophonous dreams populating, virulating consciousness. Morning. Choose bra, the style mood of the day. Athletic cotton bralette or cushioned...
Grandmother Swamp
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...
Reading Detective Novels in the Surveillance State
We will investigate each blade of grass or make it citizen to Our will. Each fellow robin a cousined detective. Our charge imperious and punishment in excess for each discrete individual worm in offense of any number of indexed and articulated and coded and justly...
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...
Breadcrumbs
iThere are a dozen books on the right shelve, unread, never opened. Ornamental books, hardcover, bare spines devoid of the author’s name or the publication’s logo. You can pick any, and you won’t know until you flip them open. I ask her why. Why such blasphemy? But...
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...
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...
Shining a light: multiple choice
1. When the lamp fails to turn on, will Gary:a) Investigate the switchb) Blame his wifec) Curse and sit in the dark 2. Will Gary’s wife, Eileen, upon being shouted at for the third time that evening for something that wasn’t her fault:a) Break down and cryb) Throw the...
Shotgun Wedding
~ after Persephone, Helen Lundeberg, 1950 The earth shivers and births a crack that fingers its way towards her toes. She realizes she hasn’t much time. Marry me, she says to the sky. Marry me, to the soil. To the rain, she gives welcome. To the stars, she offers a...
How a Nuclear Accident Can Melt a Mixtape in Verona in 1986
Marco is the coolest boy in school. He wears a bomber jacket he bought on holiday in Los Angeles, and his hair is as shiny as Michael J. Fox's. When I grow up, I will marry Marco. That is unless I marry Michael J. Fox first.I bump into Marco at the library after...
Bacon Gouda Sandwich
I lift an empty Starbucks cup from the trash and that’s how I get a fifty-cent cup of coffee. I take it to the patio and feel like god damned royalty. I’m tripping pretty hard, and the sun is a soft, ripe plum suspended in the early morning sky.I’m a girl so I never...
I Saw It Coming
Until that electrified instant, that explosive moment with us standing there with our goofy grins in front of all those people who came to tell us goodbye, I would never have condoned punching a woman in the nose. But, since it was a teenage girl who delivered the...
The Fastest Punch in the Animal Kingdom
I’m at a work conference, which is just one or two meetings a day and the rest of the time to do fuck all. For me, this means drinking my per diem. I’m two cocktails in when I see a mantis shrimp on the bar, pushing a glass of wine toward me. He stops about six...
notions of wealth
The light from the sun is obstructed at whatever angle we sit or stand. I’ve laid flat on my stomach to catch a glimpse of some form here below. A cracked door sliver. To avoid being swallowed by the inside, we make a point to get out of the apartment and take daily...
Ardorglyphs of the West
I made up the word to see if I could get a horny dork like Megan to laugh in science class. But she didn’t. Instead she wrote back, “what the shit is an ardorglyph?” Mr. Reese was talking about aspens at the front of the room. He changed the slide from the...
Tuesday Doesn’t Have to Be the Worst Day of the Week
Maybe I need to try to experience each morning like the first petals of sunrise over the horizon. Walk outside, tell myself, The snow isn’t crushing that rhododendron, see how the leaves curl in to protect themselves? Even in October. Brush some snow off if you think...
Sidewalk Eulogy
Two weeks ago, a rat turned up dead on the sidewalk. Well, actually, it couldn’t have been two weeks ago because I only moved down here on the twenty-third, so I guess it was more like one week ago. One week ago? Wait, you know what, that does make sense because I saw...
If I Was A Shitty Standup Comedian, Joking About Dreams, Rather Than A Shitty Writer, Writing About Dreams
I don’t get why no one likes to hear about other people’s dreams unless it’s because most motherfuckers don’t know how to tell a good story. It might be a dream, but you still got to structure that shit up. You can’t be all, “and then…and then…and then.” Even my...
wordafterwordafterwordafterword
1 I’m on my way in as her mother’s on her way out as in out of this world as in lying on a hospital bed with her leg to be removed as in a carton of cigarettes a day as in never broccoli as in no friends as in a special universe in which to be alone as in no one to...
Chiltepin
When Uncle gives you the hottest pepper from his collection of potted chilis, he doesn’t see a pepper. He sees the tiny crimson circle of the faraway Japanese flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima when he was 19. When you accept the pepper from Uncle, you don’t see a...
Review of Laurie Marshall’s Proof of Life by Francois Bereaud
“At first, you think it’s snowing.” This opening line of “Some of Your Favorite Things Aren’t Made to Last,” the first story in Laurie Marshall’s masterful flash collection, Proof of Life, sets the tone for an unexpected and wild, but, ultimately, very...
Executive Assistants
The markets are bullish, Bloomberg reports at the crack of dawn. We’re the only ones awake at this time, and we know. We made the markets bullish. Our apartments are tiny. We tiptoe around, getting ready for work, so we don’t wake our fast asleep partners and fast...
Postcard to X
Just Alice and Willy and Ben now. Dragging our bones across the city, hitting every red light but nothing slows us down. We streel over to Old Calton Burial Ground and dance, weave joy in and out of the gravestones, crackle and spark and sing our throats to ash. Our...
A Machine-Learning Guide to Playing Dead
When an eight-year-old punches in the keywords first and love, play dead. Remind him of his mother’s milk, its sinewy aftertaste. Shower him with images of broken vases and heart-shaped balloons that pop to the touch like a zit. Show him an essay on the...
Countdown
10… My yearning could have deforested Maine; it continued for days, ever since I saw her, open-faced like the books on display in the museum gift shop. 9… I spent my days at the gift shop mulling over the dictionary. I glared at words I would never use. They sprawled...
Boston
Track 1In high school, we were masters of the one line song. Our greatest hit went like this: Another Saturday night 70’s loser,I myself and me, playing 45s on 33,wishing Ann would go crazy on me. Track 2As lyricists, we were uniquely qualified to recognize Boston's...
Jangles is Aware of the Dangers of the Clown Car
Jangles is not cramped. Clowns are pliable, fold together neat as origami. Noodles’ round red nose against his chest, Yurple’s giant shoe against his face, these feel right and holy as a lover’s embrace. The intermittent beeping of horns and tinkle of bells as clowns...
On Sunday
Presbyterian vegetarians saddle sea urchins and go for a roe. Wahoo yahoo holy water woo. Sushi sirens singsong seduction, spinach puffs are Jesus’ best wrapped gift. Crab rangoons goon naked crudités enticed by a slice of chanterelle mushroom toast. Devils ride...
The Annual Library Book Sale
The library was flooded with book donations. Mountains of cardboard boxes filled the basement, ferried from hatchback and truck-bed, down the elevator, to gather dust with their kin. Before they could be set on narrow tables at the annual book sale, the books needed...
How to Stop a Cough
See a doctor if your cough persists for more than seven days. Tell him you wake up three, four times a night coughing, though you’re not sure if it’s your cough or the urge to pee that awakens you. Joke about childbirth and urinary stress incontinence. Chuckle with...
Sorry Kid—
“Sorry Kid.” That’s what Carrie on Season 5 Episode 23 of Kids Baking Championship says to Kyle before she steals his cinnamon during a speed challenge. This ten year old has her own cream cheese frosting recipe and I can’t stop praying long enough to get off the...
Ash Darlings
During a commercial break I notice the six boxes in the corner of my room. They contain all the drafts of my third collection of unpublished stories, rose petal words, withered. I look out of the window at the cloudless night sky. So, it's time. I pile the boxes in...
Tagged
By two in the afternoon, we’d stolen four t-shirts, three baseball caps, and twelve packs of Spearmint gum, all while making friends with the cashiers—flirting if they were girls, talking sports if they were guys—and leaving each place with our pockets stuffed and the...
There is No Nature in the Courthouse
In the jury room, two landscapers talk loudly about ailing dogs and nitrous balloons. We have been sitting here two hours waiting for the selection process to begin. An old toilet runs in the adjacent room. Opaque windows block the July sun and any sign of life. There...
Six Minutes At 4 AM
I have six minutes left before the boy I used to know as a child comes out to skate the performance of his life. I go downstairs to make instant oatmeal and the water takes ages to boil. I compose a list of things you can do in six minutes – it might well not include...
The Hole in the Wall
“When your world abruptly falls apart, inaction is a powerful counteract,” said the voice, once leaving the man to his empty room.The man walked the empty room, pacing its area as though studying it. The man did so until he became fatigued, ultimately falling asleep....
An Evening With
I found Momma’s wig and green formal in her old trunk. She’d worn them to her last birthday party at DiFranco’s. After looking in the bathroom mirror, I imagined myself on a New York stage singing her favorite numbers. I performed “My Man” and voiced every word with...
The Narrow Path of Totality
When mom would get tipsy, she’d tell this story. She had only one; beautifully embellished, wild with gestures, impeccable timing, and heart dropping punchiness.“It was a brutal labour.” She’d look around the living room and declare “You guys couldn’t begin to...
What Binds
I become things. Today I become a staple stuck in a telephone pole, chewing its corner of paper. Tastes like missing puppy flier, honeyed with a crust of sadness. Not like the bitter root of ads for the neighborhood watch. Or the starchy invitation to a show by The...
Portraits of Fowl Women
~ Swans and geese hail from the same branch off the duck family. Over time, they, too, drifted apart. Lynne’s father said they could trace ancestors all the way back to the Mayflower. Fishermen and servants leaving an old land for a new land where they became...
Kokoschka’s doll
Sometimes Kokoschka tells me I don’t exist. He whispers, you’re a transitionary object, dear doll, an illusionary surface, an overpriced representation of absence, and he groans into the feathery folds in my thighs and throws me to the floor. I was wrapped in tissue...
Window Dolls
I see other girls like me, breathing their breath, their heads against the back seat windows, greasy imprints on the glass, their gaze on blurring buildings, boys on bikes, other cars. Chevy. Chrysler. Cutlass Supreme. We are behind our parents’ heads. For the moment,...
Archie and I. Alone. Together
Archie's coat smells of old man and cat pee. You like to dip your nose down the sagging collar and inhale the earthy scent in the playground line. Others pinch their sensitive noses and make noises that tighten his fish-hooked jaw and turn his ears pink, but you find...
There’s a cabin in the woods in your suburb
Taxidermied gimmicks on the inside, pretty little necklaces hanging from jackalope antlers, jewels like glass eyes. The corpse in the armchair, he’s very handsome. But the HOA must define “death” before you approach him so the body never leaves. Growing even more...
Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler
We are heat cranky, though we try not to be. We sit in this hot room, hot because it’s South Louisiana, hot because it’s summer, hot because the air conditioner broke down. My mother carries a tray of sweet, iced tea into the enclosed side porch, usually...
The Abandoned Hydrolic Maintenance of the Archipelago
The halo didn't work as scientists expected then, the crown of thorns did not pierce the star as intended, its insides did not spill out like a slit belly and dim its brightness.Awoken from its slumber, uncontained it reached octopus-like light tendrils around the...
Standing around the Hearts
In first period health class, all twenty of us stood around the cow’s heart Miss Hutchings unwrapped on her desk. “Inside and out,” she said, “we need to know ourselves,” halving that heart with a scalpel to show us auricles, ventricles, valves, and the wall...
Idea
The writer had an idea for a story and took out his spiral pad and pencil nub from inside his ear and began to write about the phone call he received from a late-night TV host who said he was referred to him, read his collections of flash fiction and would like to...
His Confession
He uncorks a 2017 bottle of Caymus Cabernet and pours out a story twice as old. Six words filter through. Six I want to unhear. Knife, nightArgument. Slashed, severedFled So many questions to ask once my thoughts unscramble, and stomach untwists. Only one makes it...
Undeveloped
Before I leave you, I clean out my desk drawers. I no longer want to hold onto these things: Mr. & Mrs. rubber address stamp, sushi erasers you bought me even though I dislike seafood, unopened ovulation tracker. A film cartridge, black and white Kodak, 35 mm....
Ballad of Him
He rented a room on F Street, three days a week washing dishes at a local restaurant. The building he was in was broken. Small rooms split into smaller rooms by cheap drywall.Her room was down the hall. Someone he realized he knew. After work he stood outside her...
Screaming Ourselves Horse
At first, the men didn’t understand. Sometimes the change would happen at midnight, and other times it’d sweep through at midday. They’d wake to a bed frozen over, or they’d frown upon entering the kitchen, finding lunch absent from the table. Within the house, at...
Like My Grandmother’s China
You would be so surprised, I know, to learn the real reason I stayed with you far too long. One brisk October day a decade ago, walking up the steep slope of Eugenia Street, we passed a house with well-tended planter boxes. You glanced at the fuchsia nestled there and...
Aloha
Shawn and Shauntelle showed up in comical drag at the Kauai Pride Picnic at Queen Surf Beach,one in a hula skirt and coconut bra, the other tucked into short shorts and squeezed into a paddedbustier. Diane and I met them the day before as Yin and Yang, what they...
Second Hand Roses
Early nineties, dumpster diving. The blackberry back alleys of Vancouver’s gay west village have the best loot. At first we climb up and lean in, poking around with a stick. After a few killer hauls, we wade in hip deep. We find anything and everything: cupcakes,...
What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk
We’ve been together most of your life. And, I have only one rule. An eighty-four year old widow, hands trembling and crying on her marital bed - remembering her ninth year on earth and the death of her mother in 1919. Too afraid and confused to say, They took turns...
After the reading
As a final gesture, he ate the poem, starting with the rhyming couplet at the beginning andworking his way through several slant rhymes and aporia, caesura, and some nice assonance. Hepaused at the final line, peering into a sea of faces, then dropped it to the floor....
Dolor
I am at my sister’s house the day after my grandma’s funeral and we sit side by side on her carpeted floor unspeaking. She did not cry at the church yesterday or on the day our father told us the bad news, and for some reason this bothers me. This is what I’m thinking...
YTD ROI
A live public art installation where college football stadium bleachers are set up for people who think no one uses public libraries anymore to attend and observe the hundreds and thousands of people walking in and out of libraries all day. Witnessing the library for...
How to Make a Ford Mondeo Fly
Motorway air pummels through the window. Far behind, sirens cry. If there’s a roadblock, I’ll blast right through, pick up Keeley and we’ll drive drive drive—daddy and daughter on the run. We’ll spend the evidence and pay in cash for service-station sundaes and trips...
Dice
Down by the Elbow, Billy’s place was, up high on the rock, so high it was a hardship to get from the dock to the cottage. All rock, gray granite with a stripe of pink quartz marbled by white. Wind-born waves shuffled against the shore, blue-tailed skinks sunned in...
Only a parched tongue knows how much it loves the taste of water
In a few days, is Ramila’s wedding but today she must do as her mother says. Don’t drink an ounce of what you fetch. Remember, water is your liquid dowry. She doesn’t. At the village well, she jostles in a queue of women, exhausted like heads crucified on poles. The...
The Birthers
He was the first one to bathe in your blood. The only one.It had stunned you, his reappearance, like a portrait unwrapping itself from a swirling mist. He'd promised to leave the premises if your back touched the floor of the suspended hut. He'd wrestled the alabe...
Educated
It is the last night of class. The students bring me gifts. Several bottles of gin, with the distinctive colored glass. These students came up with the answer that it’s my favorite kind. I keep watch on the window in the classroom door. I’m a nervous scholar, past and...
The Jesus Slots
Through the wall, and the whole night, I hear her shouting: ‘Jesus!’ and ‘Jesus Christ!’ and ‘Jesus!’ and more of the same shit until the morning comes creeping in.At breakfast, while the sun makes its way over the tiles in the kitchen, I tease her about it over our...
Calling
The crackle of her rabbiting breath over the phone. “Hello,” I say, like always. “Hello? Is anybody there?”“I’m not sure.” Her speech fraying at the hem. Her words leaking from a badly-sealed balloon. I try to guess which woes she needs me to uproot, if any:...
How To Build A Rocket
Rocket science is still rocket science, so make sure you know the specifics of the rocket you want to build. This has gotten easier because there is so much information out there. Not so much online, but libraries are free and open anytime, anywhere. You can take out...
Bones of Steel
Tomorrow, you will come for me, you will pry me open, rip out pipes, radiator, battery, pull off my steering wheel, pluck mirrors, yank windows, haul the best of my organs for sale, scatter the rest of my body parts in four corners of the country....
The Screamer
My girlfriend’s been soliciting money for sexual encounters with older men. Her friend showed me the messages: Hi, Robert – how can we please you? This friend was to possibly join the venture; that’s what she wanted anyway, but friend thought I was an alright guy,...
The Grease Ant
An army of ants swarms a left-out jar of peanut butter. In the fresh sun, they gleam like honey. I toss the jar over the fence into the vacant yard next door and smoosh the rest of them with a paper towel. Their transparent bodies curl into miniature yoga poses as...
Saw a Shooting Star
Sparked unusual-green. Spat twice, turned widdershins three times,as Manual decrees; letter ETA two days.Fingers crossed. ++If your eyes are crusty, pick at the edges of them. The sleep is done and dusted with, another day to face, another day to try to remember what...
Sister Story
Fifteen years ago, at a diner in Hammington, Wisconsin where I grew up, Angie bit the pickle her mother said I could have—Angie hated pickles—and placed it on the Formica-topped table in front of my plate. Angie is my younger half-sister. And even though she was...
It Helped and It Didn’t
I try to move my father but the weight of him stays immobile in the twin bed while my motherfusses over the pee stain on the carpet moaning about what will Father Flynn say should we callhim for the last rites when a man from downstairs who in the old days would be...
Egg Days
I crack an egg into a pan and think about this: Once an iron bar went through a man’s brain. I learned about this in school. The injury affected his frontal lobe only, the area responsible for personality. I drop the cracked shell onto a paper towel and think about...
Statue Thinks of Nothing but Murder All Day
after James Pradier’s “Sapho” A foreign businessman pinches the ass of the Sapho sculpture in Musee d'Orsay to impress his guest, and the statue has had enough. Her prominent placement at the front of the museum ensures this happens more than should be possible,...
Spaceman
The rumor afterward was that he overdosed on Klonopin and Tylenol PM. The only observer to his ascent was a YouTube video of cloudbursts showering dry plains heavy. After midnight he slipped the bond. The volume lifted, flooded his studio apartment’s atmosphere,...
She said He said
"Clean aisle nine before you leave," Michelle said."It is clean," Derek said."Tidy up, I mean," she said."I need to leave on time today," he said."I bet you do," she remarked."Why do you say that?" he wondered."Just go and tidy up," she exclaimed."I have a part in a...
Hard Shells Too Break With Heavy Blows
A hammer strikes against the shaven brown shell. Hard. Once again, precisely at the center. The thud, strong as the hammer itself, shakes her resolve. Not today, not now, maybe later. One fiery look from her husband, his clenched teeth tightening the sides of his face...
Stone Fruit
Technically everything produced from a flower is a fruit. Does that make her a mango? It would make sense if she were a drupe. He had given her flowers on their first date. Her face had felt accosted by the perfumy pungency. “I’m a statistician”, he’d said “but not...
Mistress #19
You aren’t positive you’re a couple until you find it hard to breathe. She sweeps in, magnificent in her mutability. You might have met her on the plane, attending that long-delayed concert or during your first trip back to the...
Circe at the Strip Club
She’s punching buttons on the strip joint jukebox when a voice pipes up behind her.“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you a witch?” The voice cracks just a little, then coughs tocover it up.She finishes making her selection: “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. Her friend Onyx is upnext,...
Kindling
I lived alone on an island in a Queen Ann Victorian that was always on fire. On the day I first moved in, the turret was already ablaze, puff, puff, puffing threads of dark smoke into the sky, like coded messages to a distant land. Some people might have balked at...
Through Thin Air
The first time Cade noticed his wife’s waning presence was the day after their sixth anniversary, which he had forgotten, again, despite multiple reminders on his calendar and his phone. He had been really busy at the hospital — there was a multicar crash around noon...
Cherry Paint
“DYKE” just like that, in big, bold, red letters on the side of my brand new, shiny white car. Dial tone in my ear as I wait to tell my grandma that I won’t be able to drive her to her cardiologist appointment today. Her voicemail is what I hear next. I can’t tell her...
Self-Checkout
Lee Carson is allergic to peanuts [1], and so he does not go down the aisle with the peanut butter at the local A&P. [1] Thirty years ago, Lee’s lips swelled after eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at a picnic in the park. His mother, wrapped in her...
How to Make Money in the Summertime
Be sixteen. Go down to the Shell gas station at the corner of Welch Road and Route 309 and talk to Con Salt while he’s working the pumps. Don’t ask Con any personal questions because he’ll keep you hanging down there all day. Ask Con if there’s any work going around...
The Passions of Saint Markella
Today Markella is in a flowered dress, the kind girls wear in the summer, with straps instead of sleeves and the sun burns her shoulders. The pattern on the dress is the same as the one on the house robes of most aunts: daisies so close together they leave tiny...
Becoming a Man
Point Pleasant, WV, 1965The boy’s classmates teased him because he still slept with his favorite stuffed animal, a spotted dog with droopy ears, even though he was now twelve. It began at Toby’s sleepover birthday party. It was only 8:30 when the boy called his father...
Hoarder’s Lament
Old woman, you swore / once / on a soiled couch beneath forgotten coats beneath black trash bags stuffed with someone/ that you could /else’s cast-offs, debris from other lives clogging the storm drains of her own,/ survive the world / a rising tide of newspapers,...
Refraction
Every other night, you hide the knives. You repeat “baby” and “honey” and “darling”, but he isn’t appeased. He kicks your shin. He curses. Spits. Yanks your hair and pushes you up against freezing, concrete walls. Accuses you of screwing some man in the apartment...
Abnormal, Illinois
Ted looked down. A few shreds of his brownish-gray hair had fallen to the linoleum tiles, in a kind of aura around the barber chair. He closed his eyes. The scissors made a regular snick as they worked around his right ear. He couldn't see what the young kid in the...
Michelle Ross’s They Kept Running, review by Dan Crawley
They Kept Running (University of North Texas Press, 2022) by Michelle Ross is the 2021 Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. As I read this gem of a book by one of my favorite writers, I was not surprised this collection of flash fictions...
Virtue Signals
I don't remember at which rally I met Brad. He always went to them alone, wearing the brightest pink pussyhat and a tight "Future is Female" t-shirt. He was fit but awkward and a women's rights superfan. Sometimes, I caught him talking to himself.He eventually found...
Oh, Predator, and Me
Alice slew me. I fell like the universe from the back of a pickup truck. Big, loud thud. Picked myself up, dusted off, tried to figure out how to make myself worthy of her appetite. She stood alone at the concert, hair pulled back, a fluffy scarf hiding the skin of...
The Bed
The bed was a normal bed until you laid down on it. The first time I did I thought I was having dreams, but I wasn’t. They glowed around me, these soldered shapes in the dark. At breakfast the next morning I asked my good friend, who was the owner of the bed, why the...
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...
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...
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...
With Regrets to the Roots
When the woman was still a woman, she kept a special place in her mind where she locked away all of the things which were too unkind to say. Every medical refutation to the woman at work who kept trying to sell her essential oils for her diabetes and her septicemia...
Scream
Kelsey heard it first. She shared this huge ancient wood frame house with her grandmother, her baby brother, and her cousin Joey. Many of her friends came up with excuses when asked to come over, she understood but would still be disappointed.But she heard it, the...
Moments of Reduction
The moon longs for the tree. To be entangled in its sinuous outreaching limbs. Like sleep twining night, labor pushing out cacophonous dreams populating, virulating consciousness. Morning. Choose bra, the style mood of the day. Athletic cotton bralette or cushioned...
Grandmother Swamp
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...
Reading Detective Novels in the Surveillance State
We will investigate each blade of grass or make it citizen to Our will. Each fellow robin a cousined detective. Our charge imperious and punishment in excess for each discrete individual worm in offense of any number of indexed and articulated and coded and justly...
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...
Breadcrumbs
iThere are a dozen books on the right shelve, unread, never opened. Ornamental books, hardcover, bare spines devoid of the author’s name or the publication’s logo. You can pick any, and you won’t know until you flip them open. I ask her why. Why such blasphemy? But...
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...
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...
Shining a light: multiple choice
1. When the lamp fails to turn on, will Gary:a) Investigate the switchb) Blame his wifec) Curse and sit in the dark 2. Will Gary’s wife, Eileen, upon being shouted at for the third time that evening for something that wasn’t her fault:a) Break down and cryb) Throw the...
Shotgun Wedding
~ after Persephone, Helen Lundeberg, 1950 The earth shivers and births a crack that fingers its way towards her toes. She realizes she hasn’t much time. Marry me, she says to the sky. Marry me, to the soil. To the rain, she gives welcome. To the stars, she offers a...
How a Nuclear Accident Can Melt a Mixtape in Verona in 1986
Marco is the coolest boy in school. He wears a bomber jacket he bought on holiday in Los Angeles, and his hair is as shiny as Michael J. Fox's. When I grow up, I will marry Marco. That is unless I marry Michael J. Fox first.I bump into Marco at the library after...
Bacon Gouda Sandwich
I lift an empty Starbucks cup from the trash and that’s how I get a fifty-cent cup of coffee. I take it to the patio and feel like god damned royalty. I’m tripping pretty hard, and the sun is a soft, ripe plum suspended in the early morning sky.I’m a girl so I never...
I Saw It Coming
Until that electrified instant, that explosive moment with us standing there with our goofy grins in front of all those people who came to tell us goodbye, I would never have condoned punching a woman in the nose. But, since it was a teenage girl who delivered the...
The Fastest Punch in the Animal Kingdom
I’m at a work conference, which is just one or two meetings a day and the rest of the time to do fuck all. For me, this means drinking my per diem. I’m two cocktails in when I see a mantis shrimp on the bar, pushing a glass of wine toward me. He stops about six...
notions of wealth
The light from the sun is obstructed at whatever angle we sit or stand. I’ve laid flat on my stomach to catch a glimpse of some form here below. A cracked door sliver. To avoid being swallowed by the inside, we make a point to get out of the apartment and take daily...
Ardorglyphs of the West
I made up the word to see if I could get a horny dork like Megan to laugh in science class. But she didn’t. Instead she wrote back, “what the shit is an ardorglyph?” Mr. Reese was talking about aspens at the front of the room. He changed the slide from the...
Tuesday Doesn’t Have to Be the Worst Day of the Week
Maybe I need to try to experience each morning like the first petals of sunrise over the horizon. Walk outside, tell myself, The snow isn’t crushing that rhododendron, see how the leaves curl in to protect themselves? Even in October. Brush some snow off if you think...
Sidewalk Eulogy
Two weeks ago, a rat turned up dead on the sidewalk. Well, actually, it couldn’t have been two weeks ago because I only moved down here on the twenty-third, so I guess it was more like one week ago. One week ago? Wait, you know what, that does make sense because I saw...
If I Was A Shitty Standup Comedian, Joking About Dreams, Rather Than A Shitty Writer, Writing About Dreams
I don’t get why no one likes to hear about other people’s dreams unless it’s because most motherfuckers don’t know how to tell a good story. It might be a dream, but you still got to structure that shit up. You can’t be all, “and then…and then…and then.” Even my...
wordafterwordafterwordafterword
1 I’m on my way in as her mother’s on her way out as in out of this world as in lying on a hospital bed with her leg to be removed as in a carton of cigarettes a day as in never broccoli as in no friends as in a special universe in which to be alone as in no one to...
Chiltepin
When Uncle gives you the hottest pepper from his collection of potted chilis, he doesn’t see a pepper. He sees the tiny crimson circle of the faraway Japanese flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima when he was 19. When you accept the pepper from Uncle, you don’t see a...