“Got a boyfriend?” The red-faced doctor with big hands asks, leaning over Cindy’s pubes. “Kind of.” Cindy blushes. Watching French films with Jerry isn’t really dating. The only guy at school sharing her passion for Truffaut and Godard, he talks nonstop about cinematography and mise-en-scene. Driving them to the Vogue in his dad’s new ’76 Subaru, his long fingers dance along the steering wheel as he gushes about hand-held cameras and jump cuts. “Your mother was smart to …
The boy in the TV has golden streaks like honey in his hair and two blue diamonds for eyes, face open like a window streaming sunlight. Watch as his brows furrow over inscrutable hazel orbs, jet black hair slicked smooth and reflecting pale moonlight. The boy in the TV is a shapeshifter, and now he has your attention. The boy in the TV accumulates every fantasy you’ve concocted and reflects them all back to you, a beautiful mirror of your mind. He reminds you of a boy you dreamed …
No heavy machinery could tame the sandy unpaved road outside Babcia’s Augustów house. A grunting tractor pulling a drum came through every couple of months, but soon all who walked the road could feel its sting in their calves again. Perched on the northeastern tip of Poland, Augustów was an island carved out by four deep lakes and a few rivers which made the area’s map look like a connect-the-dots completed by a tipsy child. A dense forest surrounded the town best known for …
He was on emergency leave when it happened, home in time for his mother to enter hospice, greeted at the airport by volunteers waving little American flags. I was “home for Christmas,” my meager belongings stored in a CubeSmart storage unit while I figured out my next move. Danny had started stealing my stuff to sell for cash hoping I wouldn’t notice, waiting outside the blood bank for it to open in the morning so he could sell plasma after his latest attempt to get clean failed. I’d gotten a …
“Do you want to die?” Sundeep’s brother asks. I nod. Devidas whirls the playground spinner before I have time to grip the metal bar and hold on for my life. He races around and attempts to knock us off with sheer velocity. While I rotate like a kaleidoscope, the ground sparkles with broken glass littered below. His brother, Sundeep, falls first. I’m almost thrown from the wheel, but as the only girl in the group, it’s imperative I hold on. At the last minute, I …
In the first dream, Laxmatte, a fisherman who lives in a small cottage on the coast of Finland, removes Maiju, his plain, broad wife, to a red rocky isle in the middle of the Baltic Sea, where they remain for seven months. He pulls pink salmon in spring, herring in summer, white salmon in fall. On days after a good haul, Maiju chops the head off each fish, smokes their wet red bodies on racks, and wraps them in dried seaweed. Every three weeks, the fisherman and his wife bring the dried fish to …