The headache is the limit, the circle, the disk. The black horizon. Sometimes it’s a dull, red glow, soft latitudes of pain. Or a field of searing, orange craters. They burst open through the dark. Or, with a gentler hurt: tall, blowing vanes of magnetized color. Sometimes it’s still. Maybe then, it sleeps. When it […]
Full Stop
I want to have sex with someone, a person. It could be a man or it could be a woman or it could be a man who was once a woman or a woman who was once a man or someone who is both all the time and every day. The person could be ugly […]
Two Stories
She Lit Cigarettes Instead of Talking She was weary of continuing to write short fictions, knowing family members, friends, exes and in-laws read them as entryways into her thoughts, her plans for the future. She felt protective of her thoughts. She lit cigarettes instead of talking. She drank in place of writing. She kept her […]
The Invisible Cows
When Juju told me Isabelle was sick, my first thought was, What else is new? My next thought was, Good, at least we can get out of here now. It was Easter Sunday, and that morning we’d had our daughter, Isabelle, baptized at the same church where Juju’s parents had been married forty years earlier. […]
Cooked Water
Something hard pressed to be stopped. Look. A train rolls by the window and the birds at home on the water take off while he’s cooking eggs, cleaning up, speaking softly to himself in the quiet of the dining room, finally eating his eggs with a spoon. There’s one leaf in the yard; not his […]
Yogurt Code
Once, he had lived in this apartment, once his room and my room were only separated by a bathroom. Once, I dreamed of slipping violently through white painted sheetrock and tile and exposed brick, crushing it, striking it down, blow by blow. I dreamed of growing suddenly huge and swelling up like a balloon, trampling […]
The Approaching Planet
PUNDIT: What do you recall about the darkness? THE OLDEST LIVING ASTRONAUT: Absolutely everything. Between commercials for brain insurance, the only major news channel still remaining reports the discovery of a significant new planet: one, they say, that on its surface looks exactly like our own. It seems ridiculous at first, seeing photos so […]
The Usuals
The multiverse theory is a theory that says there are a billion universes happening at once. This means that in another universe I’m at a lesbian bar snorting lines of fire ants off the antlers of a taxidermied moon-deer, while in another space I am sleeping in a desert under a mosquito net covered with […]
The Coat
That winter a dog bit my hand. The wound, violent. I was studying cosmology. Everything began with heat and density. I didn’t know how to be happy and didn’t think I could learn it. The dog’s collar had a rabies vaccination tag but the animal didn’t look loved. Billy said lost animals aren’t random, they […]
The Wade
We saw them every day that summer as we walked to the gas station with the payphone on Wilderness Drive: two horses, standing in mud. A black horse with long hair bleached by the sun. A red and white paint horse with marks like a skull around her face. Their pasture was a cattle wade. […]
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