Hammocked in your curls. Little dead humans, embalmed with nothing but shampoo, linseed oil conditioner. Even their teeth are cleaned with scalp-curing properti...
In my second year of graduate school, there was a couple that would sometimes have sex in the printing workshop after midnight. The man had bought a foldable fu...
1.
One thing about here. You can see for miles. Civilization landed on the Appalachian hills like a bird dropping. Like bird shit falling miles downward an...
Tino lived in an old blue stucco apartment complex just off Blackstone Avenue, one of Fresno's most extended and busiest avenues. It was also next door to a fun...
I do not find my Christmas Cactus beautiful. When my boyfriend and I bought this Christmas Cactus, its arms were stiff, cute, plastic-looking, window-worthy. Bu...
The forest cleared to let the Ferris wheel in, let in the popcorn-chewers, the crushed, greasy striped hot dog trays, the guns in pockets, the new babies scream...
At the jazz club, me and Kyoko meet a guy who speaks piano. Instead of words, his mouth forms the sound of a Yamaha baby grand. Sitting at our circular table ne...
When the lights came back on the aircraft was in full nosedive. Walter had been thrown from his seat and hurled some three rows ahead. I couldn’t get rid of him...
Becky and I got into a fight. Then I died. At least I think I’m dead. A minute or so ago, a sedan swerved onto the sidewalk, smashing into my hip. I heard a squ...
Tutu took a bottle of fish sauce and the only green mango left and draped the curtain between us in the kitchenette and his cubby hole. My mother rolled her eye...
She awakes in a foreign land in a twin bed under its plaid gray duvet, surrounded by walls plastered with heavy metal posters. She’s far away from St. Louis. A ...
Yesterday was high school summer vacation, green and empty of responsibility. Yesterday I pushed a grape Jolly Rancher from cheek to cheek. Yesterday I sorted m...
It was tradition for new guests to leave behind toenail clippings after check-in. This explained the mounds of yellowed shards that dotted the hotel counter. Th...
We’re charting a new theology, Pat and I. We’re working out a pantheon of small objects. Household gods, strewn across our counters. Divinity in banality: this ...
I awake at 2 am, with this recurrent, crushing feeling of emptiness and longing, which is not sated after I roll over to spoon Sadie on the bed.
I realize it...
Where’s the movie about the person with the balanced life? I think to myself, over my morning spaghetti. The one who takes a jog before pouring their morning co...
When we go to the party together you turn into a moth and I turn into a monster. Horns grow from the top of my head, break through skin, twist and pirouette int...
We had drunk too much. We stood propped by glass cubes, mocking a clear-paned window. Like us, its clarity is mottled, a once translucency muddling with ribbons...
Having finished mowing the lawn, I walked into the kitchen with the hopes of constructing a towering sandwich reminiscent of those in the Sunday paper cartoon s...
You won’t remember going to bed. You won’t remember telling your kids to go to bed either or their sobbing when you refuse to lie with them or the sound of the ...
They converted the mall into housing units in 2026, but we were on the waiting list and didn’t get in until a few years later during what they called Phase 2. T...
Act 1: Sitting in the Road
I thought you’d come home past midnight as I chewed apart the last few stale crumbs that I had snatched from the refrigerator. It ...
Tornado watch, and there was no violence at the robotics competition, no flame-throwing, no gears clattering and rolling off into the warehouse. Friendly nerds,...
Mike Brady soaks in his new hot tub, thinking of his old wife. He’s trying to place her — the color of her hair, the shape of her eyes, and especially the sound...
I came to the spot where she knew I’d go because she’d made it this way and only this way.
I am not a man, after all.
Ashen white are the trees that circl...
As a kid, I looked after an ant colony that smelled like crocodiles. They started each day by filing in from one end of the circuit and called it a night after ...
We skipped our ten-year reunion in favor of a mini-gathering at a misplaced bar and a group stagger through the warehouse store district.
Shawn said he’d lik...