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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

“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...

 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,...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...