“Looks like murder,” says Cassie, her chubby cheeks jiggling as she nods at the green snake lying dead in the soil. Her eyes look funny, like something is missing from them. At first, I can’t hear what she says because my dad is mowing the grass. He keeps driving the mower over the same three […]
Ralph got the jaguar’s food from the zoo kitchen and loaded it into his cart along with treats for the nearby emus and alpacas. When he was a kid and someone asked, “what’s your favorite animal?” Ralph would pick some random beast—one day it was a tiger and the next a monkey. He didn’t care. […]
When my parents were getting divorced, my father told me that he never loved me. I was sixteen. My mother was in their bedroom shoving bras, jeans, underwear, t-shirts into a suitcase large enough for an adult to curl up in. My father stood in the doorway with a can of Natty Boh in one […]
There was no lipstick on my collar; no cartoonish smell lines of someone else’s perfume. There was a ghost, though, that trailed me home: a specter who didn’t slam cabinets or make things fly through the room but rather stood and stared from corners with a wispy finger pointed at me, knowing what I had […]
The door let out a pleasant chirp as they entered, a twirl of giggles and unbrushed hair, swirling together like soft serve. Reaching up with a muffled laugh to detangle her strawberry blonde from Rebecca’s brazen coal, she thought this must be a metaphor for their friendship: messy, beautiful, and undeniably intertwined. She hoped for […]
The boy with the amblyopic squint and his aunt are in the fields, furrowing dirt banks around wilted dwarf apple trees. The sun doesn’t feel millions of miles away. It’s a bright, infernal heat, closing the boy’s lazy eye further. It’s also stressing the saplings plagued with flathead borers. The beetles are eating through trunks, […]
The first time you babysit for the Watson boys, their father sits down at the kitchen table and tells you about the rules. He’s written them down on a sheet of paper and says he’ll stick it to the fridge, just in case you forget, even though they’re the same rules everybody else has: no […]
We drank red wine lounging on a white bedspread. These were the danger days. “When are you going to play me your song?” I was singing along to the Spotify station, something about being in love with a car. If I took care not to look at Merin, the singing might mellow me out until […]
My parents tell us there will be chickens at the funeral. I can’t help but snort, which doesn’t go over well with Mom, but I’m sorry, chickens? At my grandma’s funeral? I know they were all she gave a shit about, since there isn’t much to care about when you isolate yourself in the Midwest […]
Mary must have felt this way. No one asked her, and no one asked me. Even so, when the baby stirred in my belly, humming its sweet vibrations through the wood of my stomach, it felt like the incarnation. Mary—a human impregnated by God. I, Veronica—a violin impregnated by man. Well, not man. Woman. Lenora […]
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