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 […]
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. […]
Two Stories
The Good Parent Really, if you had a child, you would want one like mine. He’s never broken a dish, he smiles beatifically, he treats the most banal object with ludic curiosity. He once turned a Pez dispenser into a disaster relief aircraft, tossing bundles of emergency supplies in the form of hard candy pellets […]
Excellent Nature
I am in a forest clearing, by which I mean I am in a parking lot, awaiting my lover’s return from the RadioShack. The birds are in song and someone sneezes on a loop by the dumpster. I’ve cranked back my passenger seat for a better view of the sky through the windshield. The clouds […]
Three Stories
Crack Chicken There’s a paper plate on the counter and a plastic fork and it hurts my heart to see them just sitting there so i make an egg. I pour a little bit of sunflower oil into my small red frying pan and stick it on the hot plate. I put some pepper on […]
Burn and Dodge
There was a golf cart stolen—one of us stole, the rest caught a ride—and on it we rattled through darkness, giddy with wind on our faces, the ditches off the road to either side shades darker than what was in front of us, pitch-black. The tops of the trees ranged overhead. Everywhere my vision fell […]
I’ll Let You Go
She’d woken with a premonition in the middle of the night. This was about a man she’d once loved. Sometimes a premonition arrives after the event it describes. (In that case, would we call it knowledge?) This man drew a circle around some things and not others. (This is common. Who doesn’t have their own […]