The next improbable thing comes barreling at us as if it has nowhere else to go. How many turns of phrase would you like with that asparagus today, ma’am? I am no one’s grandmother, thank you very much.
That junk in the back of the closet doesn’t work, as expected. The house on the corner is for sale again. We could build a mountain out of that hill if the ants weren’t swarming into the holes in the bottom of your shoe.
I used to know things. I used to write them down.
Plans and hopes and dreams spin cobwebs in the guest room. A house is a home is a crocodile is a turtle painted bright pink suffocating from toxins unable to breathe. We are tattooed with awful love that never considered what it was doing.
She is recognizable. You will know her when she crawls past, slowly dying.

Mary Lynn Reed’s fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Colorado Review, The MacGuffin, and many other places. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. She lives in upstate New York with her wife, and together they co-edit the online literary journal MoonPark Review.