The three of them were having a dinner party in honor of Sarah’s fiancé leaving her, eight months ago that Monday. It was the first cold night in November, and Max and Tessa wore doubled-up socks inside their apartment. He cooked steaks on the stovetop, in a frying pan, using a fork to turn the big pieces of meat. She tossed potato wedges with cream and cheddar cheese. “What can I do?” Sarah sat …
Henry’s diary was a soiled jubilation of a recluse’s childhood, stuffed under his iguana’s terrarium, reeking of fierce terror and hands-on scrutiny of grade school intimacy and psychopathy, page by flourished page, inflamed bedlam of erect body odors as purposeful and gusty as the sticky names recorded and blacklisted in backwash gray marker mapping who slithered under-soaped flesh out of station wagons into over-sparkled classrooms cloned with crappy kid’s art and Mom bumper stickers flush …
We know what you are, say the pale birds who won’t leave my apartment, eldest daughter, you are no certain thing, telling me I inherited stove coils, a shit sense of humor, they are gaping mouths, curled fingers, flaws bundled in grandmother’s fabric, abuelita would never stand for this. I imagine she would unravel hundreds of feet of yarn-turned-leaf-buds, turned-red-flowers, ven aquí, she would say, dejame ver and together we’d rub ointment into the cracks in my skin. She is gone, I don’t have …
The cops left hours ago and took with them the drunk who’d gotten Karened for riding the Penny Pony. We saw it all. Dee says he wasn’t a drunk, just tired. I hope wherever they take him he gets some sleep, though Dee says that’s not how it works dummy, and I don’t argue. Not with Dee. Besides, the Penny Pony’s still going, and that’s why we’re standing here, not even pretending to shop any longer. The brown fiberglass legs churn and churn. I used to ride it as a kid. Thought for sure they’d …
Worm. Hook. The cast. Ripples over water. Cork aching for a tug. The boy already says he’s bored. But I can’t tell him that bored is just another word for wanting. A state he thinks will last forever, like him, bobbing along in the water, no care what’s below, what might bite. The first time I caught a bass, my father freed it from the hook and slapped its scales across my pale face, playfully, like you tickle a baby just wanting to hear it giggle. But I won’t do the same to him because his …
In light of his injuries, my brother packed his things into a van, signed a note to his wife with “In another life,” and dissolved into a cloud of dust off route 15 before returning three months later, healed and out of breath. He was younger than before and more handsome, and a part of us doubted it was him until he told us how he’d lost his leg and two fingers, a story only his wife and I knew. When he walked on both legs to the edge of their pond and emerged on the other side as a fish, we …