It’s September 1917, and Lucia has just kissed her cousin. It was a wet, complicated event, and she’s not now sure how she should go about removing the taste of it from her lips. Sheep crowd around her feet. She sticks her tongue out. On the tree before her, a woman appears.…
For as long as Jan can remember, she wanted to live in an orange house. Not a dark orange or a rust color, but a vibrant, bright orange glowing like the late evening sun – only it’s not easy to have that color on your house when you grow up in Michigan, or even…
When Darla got down to three hundred and sixty pounds, her friend Mildred threw her a party. They were the only ones there and split a huge birthday cake. The next morning, Darla had weighed herself. Three hundred and sixty-five pounds, the scale had said. “Shit,” she’d replied. # She sits on a…
You may not believe this, but one time I stole money from a charity. It was easy, because they weren’t the smartest people. First time, it was like a hundred bucks. Then like a thousand over a few weeks. I kept going, expecting to get caught. But there they were, those people feeding the…
Let me be the wronged when I try to understand where you go in the evenings. Let me follow you around the corner and see you dart into the bushes, across the lane, to the subway. I follow and wait. You are not that part of me anymore that begins inside, pours out, circles and…
You have to know, that in a desert boneyard full of airplanes, a monkey on a wing sits. In the air, a rusted plane flies. The sun sets and the plane lands. A door opens and a woman in a jacket sits in the hole, the hole of the rusted plane, the plane…
When Jeremy was ten, he grew a lot of facial hair. His parents ignored it. His brothers ignored it. But children at school whispered, and wondered: what’s wrong with this guy? Close to eleven, Jeremy fell off his bike. A car ran over his leg, breaking it. It took him four months to recover.…
