Fiction
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Inheritance
When she was seven years old, Lottie killed her first rattlesnake. As long as she could remember, her grandfather had instilled in her that The Good Californian killed the rattlesnake, spared those behind him the danger of snakebite, the venom…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Scale
With my first blood, a scale appears, hard and iridescent in the soft skin below my arm. In bathroom mirror light, elbow raised, I press and prod, fingertips rusted from menstrual discovery. They trace red, which soaks into the skin…
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: On the Last Day, the Ancestors Came
If this were the end, May needed to see.
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FROM THE ARCHIVES: Rumpus Original Fiction: Sabbath
There’s something about stillness that always comes just before the miracles.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Parallax
Summer was ending, and my sister was shrinking. I first noticed when we were sitting on the dock near the lake at our summer camp; as she stretched her bare leg toward the water, I saw a new striation of…
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction—The Christmas Party
I laugh. My laugh, this thing that sounds better on somebody else.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Self-Possession
The words blur, become meaningless. You need them to be meaningless.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: My Mother Fires Guns
You are never really at peace with what you haven’t gotten.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: What Wasn’t
She gave him a small, relieved laugh. In another world, she replied.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: shadowman
he lives in closets, stalks young kids, & takes them in the middle of the night.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Being the Baby’s Heart
I took a deep breath. A long one. And I started rocking again.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: On Sight
You stood and put your hair up. It made you a different man. You got hard and decided you were why.