After eight weeks at home, my daughter alternated between lethargy and irritability. Between sleeping and meltdowns, explosions of preadolescent rage that leveled the living room, kitchen, and shared bedroom of ...
It’s the kind of intimacy usually shared by people who are fucking. Not mother and daughter. That thought made her smile when she decided to make this garden their place: ...
My brother and I are surgeons. We spend our days in the woods by our home, slicing the limbs from eighty-year-old relics, listening to the sounds of splitting wood and ...
The pearls had already seen much catastrophe. They were happy in the Jesus Loves Me pawn shop, reclining on navy velvet. Serene. No pressure to perform. Their previous owner navigated ...
It starts with a girl— like you and me she walked these streets once. Right here, among fallen leaves and twisted roots, she found him. She held the owl orphan ...
The Bat was the guest of honor at The New Yorker literary festival that year.
Continue Reading THE BAT
Buy a bag of discarded bones and meat scraps from your butcher. Take them home and plant them. Be sure to use good potting soil and water regularly. You don’t ...
You squint at me as though you are only properly seeing me now for the first time. I scour your room which is the palest of blues. Continue ...
It was Dom and Tony’s second day in anatomy lab when Philip the cadaver started speaking to them.
“I’m an excellent specimen. If you don’t fuck this up you could ...
The sky. The grass. Blue. Green. Cloud country. Expansive. Overwhelming. So blue. So green. Screams. Mom. Toddler. Arm. Extends. Mouth. Open. Bees. Fill.
Continue Reading The Other ...
WITHIN A WEEK OF THE DAY ED MET GIOVANNA IN THE BEER PARLOUR AT THE COBALT, Mrs. Pinsky married them in the living room of her house near the corner ...
The police were always at our building, shaking down suspects, and belting out questions. Where did you get the drugs? Why did you leave the scene of the accident? He ...
And maybe he only did it because he was tired.
Maybe that was it, maybe mama not baking the honey baked ham with the glistening mounds of soaked black beans ...
Can you describe it? Can you describe the taste of water?
No, not mineral, not bubbly water…
Plain water, flat, ...
Outside the sky was clearing. The stray rock lay at an arm’s distance in his cage. His own body stood outside, free and smiling at him. With the monkey now ...
Somewhere in the dark, I heard them hit. I heard it one, two, three, and the boy crying for them to stop, then just crying, then nothing at all. If ...
The wind blows cold and lonely off the prairie at night, hurtling along at ground level, then rising up, washing over the house. Continue Reading Seafaring in Minnesota
He was beautiful if you knew him, and could be a real bastard when he wanted to, and a lot of times when he didn’t. Continue Reading ...
She takes to visiting the shed on a daily basis, constantly checking over her shoulder on the lookout for Lottie or James, hoping to snatch a couple of hours to ...
We come into this as helpless faucets of overflowing salt ducts, eager and scampering, exhausting profusely to make sense yet never availing, barely scratching. Continue Reading Irene, ...
